Interior: The Suburbs
There is no rest for the mind
in a small house. It moves, looking for God,
with a mysterious eye fixed on the bed,
into a cracked egg at breakfast,
looking for glory in an arm-chair,
or simply noting the facts of life
in a fly asleep on the ceiling.
The mind, sunk in quiet places,
(like old heroes) sleeps no more,
but walks abroad in a slouch hat
performing adultery at violent street corners;
then, trembling, returns,
sadly directs its mysterious eye
into a coffee-cup. There is no rest
for there are many miles to walk in the small house,
traveling past the same chairs, the same tables,
the same glassy portraits on the walls,
flowing into darkness.
There is no victory in the mind,
but desperate valor,
shattering the four walls,
disintegrating human love,
until the iron-lidded mysterious eye
(lowered carefully with the frail body
under churchyard gardens)
stares upward, luminous, inevitable,
piercing solar magnitudes
on a fine morning.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 28, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Interior: The Suburbs” was published in Horace Gregory’s first poetry collection, Chelsea Rooming House (Covici-Friede, 1930). About the book, poet and Academy of American Poets Chancellor William Rose Benét wrote in his review, “Round about Parnassus,” published in the Saturday Review of Literature (October 18, 1930), “There is nothing stale about this book, though it deals with stale ambitions and lusts and hopes and the drums of defeat beat in it. It is a very good book about the general average in New York. We are too near to all that life to realize the fundamental horror of it, but some citizen of the future picking up this volume will find in it the voice of an industrial era upraised, on the whole, without particular bitterness, that may seem to him fantastically harassed, if things have changed much by then.”
Horace Gregory
