Poem of the Day: ‘A Crowded Trolley Car’

Today’s Poem of the Day commemorates the September 7 birthday of the American poet Elinor Wylie (1885–1928). In her marvelous poem “A Crowded Trolley Car,” Wylie has an observing passenger meditate on the hands of people standing in a streetcar, holding to the bar and the looped straps.  

The poem, in common meter abab quatrains, turns on the tacit assumption (which has ebbed away from us in an increasingly automated world) that the condition of a person’s hands discloses that person’s station in life: a manual laborer or a man of leisure. In people’s hands, the poem assumes, their individual stories may be read.