Waiting
more poetry and destroyed most of what I had done previously.
“Three of my early poems found their way into print. One of them was addressed to a friend who had been visiting me at the old farm. When he went away it left me kind of sentimental and lonesome, I suppose, and I put my feelings into verse. Another poem entitled ‘Loss and Gain’ came out in the Independent. ‘Waiting’ was the name I gave the third and that has become well known. I can’t say as much for any of the other verses I have written, either in my youth or later when I resumed writing poetry. So I am practically a man of a single poem.
“‘Waiting’ dates back to 1862, when I was twenty-five. I was not prospering, the outlook was anything but encouraging, and it was a very gloomy period of my life. Besides, the Civil War was raging; I was thinking I ought to join the army, but my wife was very much opposed to that, and so were my folks. I was teaching school at Olive in Ulster county and was reading medicine in the office of the village doctor with the notion of becoming a physician. One evening, as I sat in the little back room of the doctor’s office, I paused in my study of anatomy and wrote the poem, which begins:
“Serene, I fold my hands and wait.
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