The Old Soldier's Story: Poems and Prose Sketches — A Reader’s Guide

Dialect as a Structural Principle

Riley uses dialect not as a single flavor but as a deliberate structural device. “Which Ane” employs Scots brogue to stage a competition among three suitors—the Holy Brither, the Scholarly, and the butt o’ baith. The refrain “Which ane for thee?” turns the poem into a repeated choice, while the dialect itself becomes a marker of identity. In contrast, “A Fall-crick View of the Earthquake” uses Midwestern rural speech: “I kin hump my back and take the rain.” The speaker’s resistance to formal English mirrors his resistance to the earthquake’s terror. By placing these poems near each other, Riley highlights how dialect can signal class, region, and attitude toward experience.

The Earthquake as Double Subject

The 1886 Charleston earthquake appears twice in the collection, each time in a different mode. The sonnet “The Earthquake” uses elevated diction and a tight rhyme scheme: “the earth moan as it slept, / And start as one in evil dreams.” The poem personifies the earth as a sleeper troubled by nightmares. Immediately following is “A Fall-crick View of the Earthquake,” where the same event is rendered in comic panic: “I’m a-goin’ to skoot, myself!” The speaker’s fear is expressed through domestic details—the clock falling, the bureau sliding—and a wry acknowledgment that only the mortgage remains. This pairing invites readers to consider how genre and voice shape our understanding of disaster.

Elegy and the Sound of Voice

Several poems memorialize specific individuals, and Riley often dwells on the quality of the lost person’s voice. In “Lewis D. Hayes,” he writes: “the sound of his voice was music, / Dearer than any note.” The poem contrasts the ongoing Christmas revelry with the silence left by the deceased. Similarly, “John Boyle O’reilly” and “Benjamin Harrison” treat public figures with personal warmth. These elegies are not merely biographical; they use the voice as a synecdoche for presence. The collection’s structure—moving from comic to solemn and back—mirrors the way memory interrupts celebration, as in “Lewis D. Hayes,” where the band plays on but the listener strains to hear a lost voice.

Movement Between Public and Private

The collection alternates between poems addressed to named individuals and those that seem to speak to a general audience. “To Rudyard Kipling” and “To the Boy with a Country” are direct addresses, while “The Old Soldier’s Story” is framed as a public performance. Yet even the public pieces contain intimate moments: in “The Earthquake,” the sonnet’s final image of a “world above its loss” shifts from personal to collective grief. The prose sketches, such as “The Judkins Papers,” introduce a different rhythm, more narrative and expansive. This movement between modes—lyric, narrative, epistolary—keeps the reader off balance, never settling into a single tone or expectation.

Readers will find that the collection rewards attention to its ordering. The juxtaposition of dialect and formal verse, of comic and elegiac, is not random but creates a conversation about how we speak of loss, fear, and community. Riley’s use of recurring images—earthquakes, voices, the contrast between high and low—gives the volume a coherence that emerges through contrast rather than consistency.

There’s a moment in these Riley pages, between the dialect and the mourning, where the earth itself feels unsteady—and I keep thinking of that same tremor in Le Corbeau = The Raven — A Closer Reading. Both whisper about what we carry after loss, only in different languages. I set them side by side once, quietly, and they seemed to nod at each other.