"From 'The Broken Home'" (1971)

An Isotta-Fraschini Roadster (1930)

The drafts of this poem appear in Merrill's journal for 1963 (pp. 60, 62). (See "From the Manuscripts of Merrill's 1963 Journal" in left margin.) It was not used in the "The Broken Home" but was published in The Yellow Pages (1971, 1974) and Collected Poems (2001). See entries A 25 and A102 in Jack W. C. Hagstrom and Bill Morgan, James Ingram Merrill: A Descriptive Bibliography (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2009).

“The Broken Home”

Small beyond great swaying glooms
Over driveway gravel strew
With golden acorns and shed plumes
From the pigeon-lariat
Twirled of a long afternoon
Stands the house of fifty rooms.
In front the white Isotta gleams
Like a solar chariot.
Everything is as it seems:
Servants loyal, mistress kind,
Master wise, and cupid mossy-blind
At the fountain's heart; and all
Imperceptibly grown small.
It is the house of dreams.