Reuben Bright
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Because he was a butcher and thereby
Did earn an honest living (and did right),
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
Was any more a brute than you or I;
For when they told him that his wife must die
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,
And cried like a great baby half that night,
And made the women cry to see him cry.
And after she was dead, and he had paid
The singers and the sexton and the rest,
He packed a lot of things that she had made
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.
"Reuben Bright" is a (modified) Petrarchan sonnet[1] written by American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, early in his career, and published in Children of the Night (1897). The poem acquired some fame as teaching material for English teachers.
"Reuben Bright" is a sonnet with decasyllabic lines of iambic pentameter.[2] Its structure is that of the Petrarchan sonnet according to Stephen Regan;[1] its rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA CDCD EE. In other words, the octet has two quatrains of enclosed rhyme, and the sestet has a quatrain of alternating rhyme and a concluding couplet.
The poem tells of a butcher, Reuben Bright, who might be supposed to be rough and unfeeling because of his profession, but when news is brought that his wife is to die, he cries like a baby. When she dies, he packs up all the articles she handcrafted in a chest and adds cedar boughs (a "traditional symbol of death"[2]) and then destroys the slaughter house. One critic said the poem shows "a man's devotion to his wife".[3] Like many of Robinson's narrative sonnets, "Reuben Bright" has a "characteristic signature: usually a bizarre or extraordinary story", according to Donald Hall, who also noted that in its first printing the last line was altered significantly by a typo: the poem had been printed with the last line saying "tore down to the slaughter house".[4]