The One Hoss Shay: With Its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet &the Broomstick Train
1858
The One Hoss Shay: With Its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet &the Broomstick Train
1858
Oliver Wendell Holmes composed what may be the most cleverly devastating poem about entropy ever written, disguised as a children's rhyme about a horse-drawn carriage. The Deacon's Masterpiece builds a carriage so perfectly balanced that no single part fails first: it runs for exactly one hundred years, then collapses all at once on its centennial, leaving only a heap of dust and memory. The comic precision of Holmes's meter makes the inevitable fallfunnier and more affecting than any straightforward elegy. This volume also includes "How the Old Horse Won the Bet," a wry fable about perseverance, and "The Broomstick Train," where Holmes sends witches careening through the afterlife in delightful defiance. These are poems that work on children as playful nonsense and on adults as sharp, bittersweet commentary on time, craftsmanship, and the stubborn beauty of things built to last until they suddenly don't.
