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 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.
The poem's value, he argues, lies in the tension between that "matter-of-fact" language (and the close tonal connection between, for instance, "Bright" and "brute") and the psychological depths Robinson hints at, opened by the butcher's "capacity for deep feeling".
[6] Martha Fisher, in a discussion of the process-intervention model in teaching literature, mentioned "Reuben Bright" (and "Richard Cory") as a narrative poem that students could be asked to rewrite as a short story or a play.