Housecleaning Reverie

It’s time to move the parlor out into the sitting room

And pile it to the ceiling till it’s like a musty tomb;

With chairs stacked in the corners, and the pictures on the shelf,

A look of haunted misery upon your humble self.

It’s time to take the bucket and the mop and deadly broom

And make a charge, like San Juan, upon the empty room,

And clean and scrub, and scrub and clean till you are fit to faint,

Till you can see to comb your hair within the polished paint.

Then out there in the living rooms where hubby smokes and reads

Where he in ordinary times sits planning noble deeds,

An air of deep disorder reigns, he finds no place to sit,

And O, the look upon his face, I dread to picture it!

He cannot find his magazine, his pipe is buried deep,

There isn’t any place to site, much less a spot to sleep,

And so he raves about the house like a lion in a pen,

And prays to have his reason spared till summer comes again.

O yes, it’s time to tackle it, as all good housewives do,

And have a month of cussedness, and fret and fume and stew;

Said stew however isn’t like the kind one longs to meet,

For during this housecleaning scrape there’s not a thing to et.

And so we sigh for Southern seas, where such thing cannot be,

Where people have no house to clean, no clothes, no misery;

But – here I’m interrupted, think I hear my wife, by jove,

She wants me in the kitchen, and she wants to move the stove!

March 17, 1899

Pub. Apr. 16, ‘99

World