Poverty
I saw an old cottage of clay,
And only of mud was the floor;
It was all falling into decay,
And the snow drifted in at the door.
Yet there a poor family dwelt,
In a hovel so dismal and rude;
And though gnawing hunger they felt,
They had not a morsel of food.
The children were crying for bread,
And to their poor mother they’d run;
‘Oh, give us some breakfast,’ they said,
Alas! their poor mother had none.
She viewed them with looks of despair,
She said (and I’m sure it was true),
‘’Tis not for myself that I care,
But, my poor little children, for you.’
O then, let the wealthy and gay
But see such a hovel as this,
That in a poor cottage of clay
They may know what true misery is.
And what I may have to bestow
I never will squander away,
While many poor people I know
Around me are wretched as they.
I chose this font because it is from a different time period and different country. Jane Taylor lived in England during the 18th and 19th centuries and still saw the same poverty we do today in America. She describes small ramshackle homes filled with absolute misery, the same kinds of homes that were documented in the American Midwest during the Dust Bowl, and the same we see in images from the slums of India and other foreign places. I thought the poem represented the universality of poverty and even the similarities of human beings and human society across the globe.
Yes, sadly poverty does seem to be universal. But perhaps your generation will be the last to say that...
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