Brief on Our Hired Girl - a poem by James Whitcomb Riley

Our Hired Girl - a poem by James Whitcomb Riley

About poet

Born in Indianapolis in 1853 James Whitcomb Riley's popularity is largely based on his poetic portrayal of the common man and his hardships whether he is working on the farm or in the workshop.

Riley was born in the little country town of Greenfield, twenty miles east of Indianapolis in 1853. He dabbled with being a painter first painting advertisements for patent medicines and then for the many local business firms. Later on he tried his hand at writing for newspapers. Eventually he broadened his worksphere to and became a travelling lecturer, and reader of his penned poems.

Much of his poetry charms us with its presentation of rural life. The Old Swimmin'-Hole and 'Leven More Poems (1883), is a purely delightful poem collection. Our Hired Girl is one from this collection.


About poem


Although Riley also wrote on important subjects, he is best remembered as the poet of Indiana’s ordinary people. Two such people are the Raggedy Man and ‘Lizabuth Ann, the hired girl. Unlike Little Orphan Annie, who is working for her keep, the hired hand and the hired girl are working for a busy farm family and receiving wages. The Raggedy Man was a real person that Riley knew as a boy. As in many of Riley’s poems, we see the hired hand and ‘Lizabuth Ann from the perspective of the child who narrates the poems. Both The Raggedy Man and Our Hired Girl offer insight to the type of work done on farms and in farm households during Riley’s youth. Although they are humble people, it is clear that they are kind, good humored, and willing to take time out from their work to pay attention to children. They are people who will shake a crunchy apple down from the apple tree or offer a child a slice of warm custard pie.

Entire poem can be found at -
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44954/our-hired-girl

Lance Jeffers - 332 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Lance Jeffers


A poet, short fiction writer, and novelist, Jeffers’ work was not included in the list of Black movement literature. For a long time, he was bypassed as just a writer and his voice was not ‘loud enough’. Yet Jeffers's political stances as a poet are culturally nationalistic and informed by a consistent appreciation of the beauty and possibilities in black people. - source OxfordRefernce

Several of his poems in Africa Where I Baked My Bread are about San Francisco and the people and experiences you had there.


"Africa, I lay my hand upon your swarthy belly-

And keep it there till death stubs his toe

against my manhood in the night"

Marianne Moore - 320 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Marianne Moore

A poet and then an editor, Marianne Moore is known as a modernist poet. While working as an assistant at the New York Public Library, in 1921, she regularly met poets such as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Here is where she had her earliest impact of writing and prose.

She could convey deep ideas in simple and compact lines making the readers draw meaning and inferences.

What Are Years? -Marianne Moore

What is our innocence,

what is our guilt? All are

naked, none is safe. And whence

is courage: the unanswered question,

the resolute doubt—

dumbly calling, deafly listening—that

in misfortune, even death,

encourages others

and in its defeat, stirs


the soul to be strong? He

sees deep and is glad, who

accedes to mortality

and in his imprisonment, rises

upon himself as

the sea in a chasm, struggling to be

free and unable to be,

in its surrendering

finds its continuing.



The poem seeks to answer questions to the recognition of one’s own reality. The speaker wonders as to the true nature of one’s “soul.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox - 309 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Famous for her line, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you”, from her poem “Solitude”, published in 1883, Ella Wheeler Wilcox was a journalist besides being a poetess. Her poems primarily were about passion and some even had eroticism. At her time, during the 1860s and 70s , she was even compared to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. However, after her marriage in 1884, her poems showed a transformation of her persona. Her writings showed morality in thought, spiritualism and theosophy. The following statement by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “As we think, act, and live here today, we built the structures of our homes in spirit realms after we leave earth” marks her transformation.



The Year by Ella Wheeler Wilcox


Through this poem, Wilcox puts emphasis on contrasts in life. She places opposing elements of life together, such as laughing and weeping and hoping and dying. It is with these good and bad parts of life in mind that she presents a fuller, more realistic picture of the “new year.” The new year shows a beginning to change into something good.


The poem begins with the speaker wondering what is left in the world that can be new. Even though it is a new year, that does not mean anything has changed. There is a sense of desolation and lost cause. In the next five couplets, the speaker admits there is nothing changes at all. She testifies this by the realisation of the presence of dreams and the way they lead one through life, ideally, to knowledge. She also presents laughter and weeping as opposite, but equally present parts of life. Where there is sorrow, eventually joy comes soon and vice versa.

The poem concludes by a blanket statement that life is a mixed bag and even the joys are a “burden of life.”

The Death of Slavery by William Cullen Bryant - 307 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

William Cullen Bryant - the American nature poet


Poetry and satire came to Bryant very early. At thirteen, he wrote “The Embargo,” a satirical poem calling for the resignation of President Thomas Jefferson. With a very specific aim to his education, he enrolled as a sophomore at Williams College as he desired to transfer to Yale. During this young age, he wrote the poem Thanatopsis, whose theme was literally, a consideration of death. This was inspired by his prolific reading of the works of poets such as William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and Robert Blair's The Grave.


Image - Thanatopsis, and other poems - 1884, Clark & Maynard

However, his first published book of poems was Poems in 1821. Along with this, he is also the author of several other books - The White-Footed Deer and Other Poems (1844), and The Fountain and Other Poems (1842).


For most of his life he was editor in chief of the New York Evening Post. His writings spoke for workers, abolition of slavery and for the rights of immigrants.

The Death of Slavery by William Cullen Bryant

The poem was written  just after the American Civil War ended. Hence there is a heavy portrayal of personified slavery, effects of war and the horrors of bondage.

This poem is an satirical take on slavery and bondage. Bryant imagines that an evil man through his pride and power held innocent humans as slaves. But the abolitionists - shown here as saviours - by divine intervention, freed them. The themes here are of good vs evil, power vs saving and God vs power of devil. Bryant also tries to give a message - of the sheer evil of slavery.


O Thou great Wrong, that, through the slow-paced years,

Didst hold thy millions fettered, and didst wield

The scourge that drove the laborer to the field,

And turn a stony gaze on human tears,

Thy cruel reign is o’er;

Thy bondmen crouch no more

In terror at the menace of thine eye;

For He who marks the bounds of guilty power,

Long-suffering, hath heard the captive’s cry,

And touched his shackles at the appointed hour,

And lo! they fall, and he whose limbs they galled

Stands in his native manhood, disenthralled.

Margaret Taylor-Burroughs - 306 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Margaret Taylor-Burroughs was an American writer, poet, visual artist and educator. She co-founded the Ebony Museum of Chicago which later became the DuSable Museum of African American History. She was an active member of the African-American community, and her writings reflect that. Taylor-Burroughs was a prolific writer, and she directed especially children, toward the exploration of the black experience. She focused on the importance of appreciating cultural identity and to draw meaning from black art. She is also credited with the founding of Chicago's Lake Meadows Art Fair in the early 1950s.




What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black (Reflections of an African-American Mother)

By Margaret Taylor-Burroughs - 1963

What shall I tell my children who are black

Of what it means to be a captive in this dark skin

What shall I tell my dear one, fruit of my womb,

Of how beautiful they are when everywhere they turn

They are faced with abhorrence of everything that is black.

Villains are black with black hearts.

A black cow gives no milk. A black hen lays no eggs.

Bad news comes bordered in black, black is evil

And evil is black and devils' food is black…