Armazindy / The Poems and Prose Sketches of James Whitcomb Riley

Chapter 20: AN OLD-TIMER

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About This Book

A mixed collection of poems and prose sketches that depicts small‑town and rural life through vernacular narration, sentimental observation, and comic detail. Longer narrative pieces explore personal loss, domestic struggles, and neighborhood intrigues, while shorter lyrics and children’s verses celebrate play, memory, and everyday tenderness. The voice shifts between musical, folksy dialect and plain colloquial phrasing, producing a rhythmic, conversational tone. Recurrent concerns include household labor, family ties, youthful fancy, and the mingled humor and nostalgia of ordinary community experience.

AN OLD-TIMER

Here where the wayward stream

Is restful as a dream,

And where the banks o’erlook

A pool from out whose deeps

My pleased face upward peeps,

I cast my hook.

Silence and sunshine blent!—

A Sabbath-like content

Of wood and wave;—a free-

Hand landscape grandly wrought

Of Summer’s brightest thought

And mastery.—

For here form, light and shade,

And color—all are laid

With skill so rarely fine,

The eye may even see

The ripple tremblingly

Lip at the line.

I mark the dragon-fly

Flit waveringly by

In ever-veering flight,

Till, in a hush profound,

I see him eddy round

The “cork,” and—’light!

Ho! with the boy’s faith then

Brimming my heart again,

And knowing, soon or late,

The “nibble” yet shall roll

Its thrills along the pole,

I—breathless—wait.