New Hampshire · Chapter
A Brook in the City explained
The poem reflects on a farm house that now stands incongruously within a modern city street, and mourns the loss of a once-living brook that has been buried underground in a sewer.
What happens
The poem reflects on a farm house that now stands incongruously within a modern city street, and mourns the loss of a once-living brook that has been buried underground in a sewer. The speaker recalls intimate interactions with the brook and questions how an immortal natural force can be disposed of, suggesting that the buried brook's suppressed thoughts may disturb the city's peace.
Themes in this chapter
Nature and Transience
The brook, once a living force intimately known by the speaker, is buried and forgotten, illustrating the transient and displaced nature of the natural world in the face of urban development.
Commerce vs. Authenticity
The city's expansion and the brook's burial represent the triumph of commercial and industrial progress over authentic, natural experience, leaving only ancient maps as evidence of what was lost.
Key passages
“The farm house lingers, though averse to square / With the new city street it has to wear / A number in.”
The old farmhouse still stands, but it is reluctant to fit in with the new city street where it now has a street number.
The house is an anachronism, forced into an urban grid it was never meant for.
“The brook was thrown / Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone / In fetid darkness still to live and run— / And all for nothing it had ever done / Except forget to go in fear perhaps.”
The brook was dumped into a dark, foul sewer beneath stone, where it continues to flow, punished for no reason other than perhaps not being afraid enough to hide.
The brook's burial is portrayed as an unjust, almost vengeful act against an innocent natural force.
“But I wonder / If from its being kept forever under / The thoughts may not have risen that so keep / This new-built city from both work and sleep.”
I wonder if the brook's suppressed spirit has given rise to thoughts that disturb the city's inhabitants, robbing them of productivity and rest.
The buried brook may haunt the city, suggesting that nature's suppression has psychological consequences.