Main Street, and Other Poems — Edition Insights

The Human Scale of Main Street

In the title poem, Kilmer personifies the street itself, claiming it "recognise[s] its friends" and remembers every wagon, buggy, and child. This is not a generic pastoral—the speaker specifies "a hundred teams on Main Street in a day" and "twenty or thirty people." The numbers are small, deliberately so, to contrast with the anonymous "thousand wheels" of a city street. Kilmer's choice of the word "humaner" is striking: it is a comparative adjective applied to an inanimate object, suggesting that the street possesses a quality of humanity that actual city streets lack. The poem ends by reimagining the Milky Way as "Main Street, Heaventown," a metaphor that domesticates the cosmos itself. This impulse to make the vast familiar recurs throughout the collection.

Roofs and the Refusal of Wanderlust

"Roofs" directly challenges the romantic figure of the vagabond. Kilmer writes, "I never have seen a vagabond who really liked to roam / All up and down the streets of the world and not to have a home." The assertion is categorical, almost defiant. He extends the argument to gypsies, who "will sleep in his cart with canvas overhead" but still seek a roof at night. The poem's structure mirrors its content: the speaker turns from "the open road and the starlight on my face" to a "human dwelling place." Kilmer's diction here—"splendour of out-of-doors" versus "human dwelling place"—sets up a binary that the poem then dismantles. The gypsy's cart is both mobile and enclosed, a compromise between freedom and shelter. Kilmer seems to suggest that the desire for home is universal, even among those who appear rootless.

War as a New School

"The New School" transforms a peaceful academy into a battlefield. Kilmer's imagery is precise: "the tennis-racquet and balls / Lie still in their lonely locker." The word "lonely" anthropomorphizes the equipment, echoing the personification of Main Street. The poem's central conceit—that war is a school where "they who were learning how to live are learning how to die"—is starkly ironic. Kilmer avoids glorifying combat; instead, he focuses on absence: "a stern peace, a strange peace, a peace that War has made." The alliteration of "stern" and "strange" emphasizes the unnaturalness of this quiet. Later, he imagines "ghosts in the old school, brave ghosts with laughing eyes," a haunting image that blends nostalgia with loss. The poem's structure moves from stillness to action to memory, mirroring the trajectory of the soldiers it describes.

Echoes of Romantic Ireland

"Easter Week" is a direct response to W.B. Yeats's line "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone." Kilmer counters: "Then, Yeats, what gave that Easter dawn / A hue so radiantly brave?" The poem is structured as a rebuttal, using a question to introduce its thesis. Kilmer's diction is biblical—"rain of blood," "blessed the earth"—and his imagery is violent yet fertile: "Red rain in gay blue April weather." He invokes historical Irish rebels—Lord Edward, Sarsfield, Emmet, Padraic Pearse—as if they have risen from their graves. The line "There is no rope can strangle song" asserts the persistence of poetry and patriotism beyond death. The poem's rhythm is insistent, with short lines and strong rhymes that drive toward its defiant conclusion. Unlike the nostalgic tone of "Main Street," this poem is urgent and political, showing Kilmer's range from the domestic to the revolutionary.

Kilmer's poems reward attention to small details: a butcher's cart, a gypsy's tent, a locker full of tennis balls. These objects anchor his larger themes of home, war, and faith. Readers may notice how often he uses the word "human" or its variants, and how he personifies streets, roofs, and even the Milky Way. The collection moves from the local to the cosmic, from peace to violence, without losing its grounding in the concrete. Approach these poems as a series of arguments—with Yeats, with wanderlust, with the very idea of progress—rather than as mere lyrics.

The rain kept time with Kilmer’s careful rhymes, that ache for a porch and lamplight. Then his stark war verses pushed the quiet away, leaving a different solitude. After closing it, I found myself reaching for Some Poems — Edition Insights, almost without thinking. Its spare lines held the same honest hush, a gentler echo of that afternoon’s mood.