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Barns in Literature From "A Barn is More
Than a Building. It is a Shrine to Our Agrarian Past," by Jim Doherty,
Smithsonian Magazine, August 1989:
The next thing you notice is the smell -- hay and manure, for sure, and perhaps, depending on the time of year, a whiff of apples or freshly split cordwood. Something happens to the quality of light in a barn. Remember? It becomes softer, richer; it takes on the warmth of the beams. If there are horses or cattle in the building, you can hear them moving around and sense their alert presence. On a clear winter night, with moonlight flooding in through the open doors, you may also sense the presence of others who have been in the barn before you, the generations of families who worked in it and cherished it, the neighbors and craftsman who helped raise it a century or more ago.
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From "My Antonia,"
by Willa Cather,
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1918:
It was eleven o'clock when I at last took my bag and some blankets and started for the barn with the boys. Their mother came to the door with us, and we tarried for a moment to look out at the white slope of the corral and the two ponds asleep in the moonlight, and the long sweep of the pasture under the star-sprinkled sky. The boys told me to choose my own place in the haymow, and I lay down before a big window, left open in warm weather, that looked out into the stars. Ambrosch and Leo cuddled up in a hwy-cave, back under the eaves, and lay giggling and whispering. They tickled each other and tossed and tumbled in the hay; and then, all at once, as if they had been shot, they were still. There was hardly a minute between giggles and bland slumber. I lay awake for a long while, until the slow-moving moon passed my window on its way up the heavens. I was thinking about Antonia and her children; about Anna's solicitude for her, Ambrosch's grave affection, Leo's jealous, animal little love. That moment, when they all came tumbling out of the cave into the light, was a sight any man might have come far to see. Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade -- that grew stronger with time...
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From "Giants in the Earth: A Saga
of the Prairie,"
by O.E. Rolvaag, Harper &
Brothers, 1927:
Per Hansa had put a great deal of thought into this matter of building a house; ever since he had first seen a sod hut he had pondered the problem. On the day that he was coming home from Sioux Falls a brilliant idea had struck him -- and idea which had seemed perhaps a little queer, but which had grown more attractive the longer he turned it over in his mind. How would it do to build house and barn under one roof? It was to be only a temporary shelter, anyway -- just a sort of makeshift, until he could begin on his real mansion. This plan would save time and labor, and both the house and the barn would be warmer for being together... He had a vague recollection of having heard how people in the olden days used to build their houses in this way -- rich people, even! It might not be fashionable any longer; but it was far from foolish, just the same. It will go hard with Beret, he thought; she won't like it. But after a while he picked up courage to mention her plane to her. ...House and barn under the same roof? ...She said no more, but fell into deep and troubled thought. ...Man and beast in one building? How could one live that way? ...At first it seemed utterly impossible to her; but then she thought of how desolate and lonesome everything was here and of what a comfortable companion Rosie might be on dark evenings and during the longer winter nights. She shuddered, and answered her husband that it made no difference to her whichever way he built, so long as it was snug and warm; but she said nothing about the real reason that had changed her mind. This answer made Per Hansa very happy.
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From "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy
Queen,"
by Larry McMurtry:
From the loft of the barn, or from
the little platform on top of the
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From "The People, Yes," by Carl
Sandburg:
For sixty years the pine lumber barn
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From "Billy Ray's Farm," by Larry
Brown:
There were some pieces of rusted tin lying out across the short pasture grass in front, remnants of the tornado of ‘84 that sucked the two-story barn up howling and spewed it back into thousands of pieces, and it was still lying here and there. Once in a while you’d run over a piece of it... In winter the cattle are warm and happy in a well-lighted barn, a vast cathedral of timbers and stalls, racked hay, a tack room, a vaccination pen, a calving pen, a dehorning pen, a catch pen built of heavy pipe. There is a cat—several cats—to keep the barn free of rodents and a few wandering chickens to pick up the ticks and fleas. The great center hall of the barn is loud late at night with the sound of Billy Ray’s boots on the concrete, for there will be no slipping and sliding here in mud while trying to deliver a calf. Electric lights will furnish the brilliance required to work on mothers in trouble.
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"The Old Barn," by Twyla Hansen,
from Palo Alto Review and forthcoming in "Rural Voices: Literature at the
Millennium":
1.
The overhead cave where we inhale
field dust,
sweep past, a ladder rises from composted
manure.
How will we extinguish it without
being caught?
2.
Grandmother isolated and frightened,
this treeless flatland.
The new barn, its beckoning rafters,
the only height for miles.
My brothers and I tasting fear, smelling
our own small demise,
If our grandparents survived grief
and nature, why can't we?
Twyla Hansen of Lincoln was raised on land in rural Burt County that her grandparents farmed as immigrants from Denmark in the late 1800s. Even though she left the farm years ago, that sense of place, with all its smells and seasons and joys and heartbreaks, informs everything she writes.
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"Destruction," by James Hearst,
from "Snake in the Strawberries," Iowa State University Press, 1979:
The barn stood for shelter on squared corners with a tight roof until the wind sucked it up and spit it out in a shambles of splintered boards. I tried to salvage the ruins. While I pulled the nails and sorted out split studding, citizens of the barnyard clustered around -- pigeons fluttered where once the ridge pole hung, sparrows frisked through broken window frames -- let me sweat over the collapse of order. I lit my pipe and tossed the match toward the tumbled hay and let chance decide if it lived or went out. The flame caught, winked among the stems, then tongued the air until the draft formed a chimney and the fire went mad. I leanded against a corner post, the roar of the fire like music, the lunge of its appetite now beyond control.
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"Barn Bridges," by Sandra Mann
of Burwell, in memory of her father, Parmer Helmer (1911-1969) of Arthur:
Left over straw
Spider webs
Dad, though gone, comes alive when I step into my barn. Sandra Mann of Burwell says, "The actual structure is not so important to me as the comfort I feel whenever I step into a barn and sense his presence."
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"An Icelandic Woman Visits Minneota,"
from "Prairie Days," a collection of essays by Bill Holm, Saybrook Publishing
Company, 1987:
She and I go to an old round barn by the river. The barn is full of the smell of old hay. Wind whistles through missing shingles in the high dome. Iron stalls are empty now. We see hoofprints on black dirt, made by cattle long since dead and eaten. From a nail she takes down a horse harness, leather dried and cracked. "From Iceland," she says, and caresses it. We walk into the empty hayloft, fifty feet high, shaped like a cathedral dome. The last sunlight blown into the holes of the dome by prairie winds shines the floor like a polished ballroom. I walk under the dome, open my mouth, and sing -- an old Italian song about the lips of Lola the color of cherries. The sound rolls around the dome and grows. It comes back to me transformed into horse's neighing.
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The first thing you notice is the
tremendous amount of space. A barn feels a lot like
a church inside. Even a small one seems big because when you stand between
the haylofts and look up, your view of the roof is unobstructed, save for
the massive timbers that support it.
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Phone 402-474-2131 or e-mail nhc@nebraskahumanities.org |
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