Abandoned Farmhouse By Ted Kooser Summary

The poem, “Abandoned Farmhouse” by Ted Kooser, is centered around the objects left behind by a family. This family lived in a rural area that the poet describes as lonely. We know that money was scarce for them, which made their daily lives on the lonely farm quite difficult; however, it seems that they were a happy family. As the poem continues, we learn different things about the family, like the fact that they had a child, through personification and imagery. The objects begin to tell a tragic story and claims in line 17 that “something went wrong”. As the objects are observed, the reader feels like a stranger is walking around the house trying to decipher what went wrong. As the story progresses, the tone develops through the details of …show more content…
Although the poem is very descriptive, the ending of the poem is inconclusive and is left up to the reader to decide, which evokes curiosity. We know that the woman left hurriedly; however, we know nothing of what happened to the man and his child. No one would expect this failure and eventually tragedy to happen to them, which Kooser uses to show that bad things can happen to anyone. Kooser utilizes imagery and personification to demonstrate failure, which leads to abandonment.

This poem has an abundance of imagery because the author is using it to communicate how the farmer’s failure inevitably leads the abandonment of their home. The farmer, up until lines 7-8, is described with a neutral connotation; however, these lines reveal that he was “not a man for farming, say the fields / cluttered with …show more content…
This story is not told by a speaker or the author because the poet chose to observe the objects lying around and let them tell the story. In lines 17-18, it says, “Something went wrong, says the empty house / in the weed-choked yard.”. Even though the empty house is incapable of speech, the observer recognizes that something must have occurred to have driven the family out of the house. The act of personification here distances the family from the empty house. Continuing with the observation of abandonment, lines 19-20 says, “the still-sealed jars / in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste”. This is personification because the jars aren’t saying that the woman left quickly or that she left at all. One can assume from their presence in the abandoned cellar that she left them there because she was leaving quickly and forgot to grab them. Personification is used primarily to tell the story from a different point of view in this poem and to distance the family from their past life in their now abandoned home. Throughout this poem, there is not a specified speaker; however, the objects left behind tell the story of how the farmer’s failure lead to the family abandoning their