'To Show the Poetry of the Commonplace'

A friend in Schenectady, N.Y. worked as a lineman for the telephone company for almost half a century, into his seventies. He was the guy who strapped on a belt and spikes and climbed those sliver-making poles, and later showed rookie linemen the ropes. On the side, Bob was an amateur painter, mostly still lifes. He was self-taught and gifted but shy about his pastime. I once admired a watercolor hanging in the studio at the back of his garage -- black wooden frame, simple white matting -- and he gave it to me: 

Against a plank floor, white wainscotting, and a blue and brown abstract wall that suggests a cloudy sky stands an old-fashioned washing machine with a hand-cranked wringer. On the lid are three green tomatoes -- the touch that cinched my admiration. Bob had painted it a few years earlier, in 1994. It was based on a real scene he found in a long-abandoned farmhouse near Cooperstown. He wanted the focus on the washing machine, so the background is featureless. The machine is painted from life, his only addition being the tomatoes. He added them on a whim, as a green contrast to all the whites and icy blues, and by doing so created my favorite painting among those hanging on our walls. Bob never titled his paintings.

 

On this day, February 25, in 1894 – precisely one-hundred years before Bob painted his farmhouse scene – Edwin Arlington Robinson enclosed a draft of his villanelle in trimeters “The House on the Hill” in a letter to his friend Harry de Forest Smith. From the time Bob gave me the painting thirty years ago, I’ve always associated the scene with Robinson’s poem, especially the closing stanza:

  

“There is ruin and decay

In the House on the Hill:

They are all gone away,

There is nothing more to say.”

 

Yet Bob found something to say about it. Robinson describes his poem in the letter to Smith as “a little mystical perhaps and is an attempt to show the poetry of the commonplace.” Villa: from the Latin for “country house.” Villanelle: the same, by way of Italian for “rural, rustic.” (OED)