Page 16

By Jack Joseph Smith

When the soulder they had looked to as true In their youth came back to the town dirt poor They considered it a hamper on progress To take up with that time anew When the great come home to tramp The city as one, the field alone And the wood deep to be gone again Say hello like the sea against a single lamp But those within, and those spread Don't know the compas as the nature of things They think thoughts that tangle guts As well enough alone terms the dead When I came home thin and wild from the West They came to see me often while still at the estate But when I rolled up my sleaves to marry And begin my madness here outside of the father They lost their taste By God with there nest

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A poor returnee and the speaker's own homecoming expose a town's withdrawn admiration; the typed body ends with the claim that they lost their taste.

The speaker connects the withdrawal to marriage and a life outside the father. The separate handwritten By God and lower note may amend the final stanza, but their placement remains unresolved.

Claude

A typed poem about homecoming: when 'the soulder they had looked to as true' came back 'dirt poor', the town 'considered it a hamper on progress', and when the speaker 'came home thin and wild from the West' and 'rolled up my sleaves to marry / And begin my madness here outside of the father', 'They lost their taste'. Handwritten 'By God' sits in the margin beside that verdict, and a separate note below reads 'with there nest'.

The poem measures a community's regard by how it treats those who return changed or poor, and its plain stanzas keep the judgment matter-of-fact until the one-line verdict. The handwritten additions read as later heat breaking into the typed draft, but neither has a fixed place in the text.