The Investment
The Investment - form Summary
A Sonnet's Questioning Turn
The poem is explicitly a sonnet that compresses two contrasting scenes—a newly painted house with a piano and a laborer counting potatoes in a cold field—into a compact moral question. The sonnet’s volta arrives in the closing lines as the speaker moves from description to speculation about why renewal happened: money, young love, or an old couple’s refusal to be swallowed by routine. The tight form focuses attention on ambiguity and choice, making the unanswered questions feel decisive and morally pointed.
Read Complete AnalysesOver back where they speak of life as staying (‘You couldn’t call it living, for it ain’t’), There was an old, old house renewed with paint, And in it a piano loudly playing. Out in the plowed ground in the cold a digger, Among unearthed potatoes standing still, Was counting winter dinners, one a hill, With half an ear to the piano’s vigor. All that piano and new paint back there, Was it some money suddenly come into? Or some extravagance young love had been to? Or old love on an impulse not to care- Not to sink under being man and wife, But get some color and music out of life?
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