Eugene Carman speaks from beyond the grave about a life spent as Thomas Rhodes’ employee. For over twenty years he has sold shoes, flour, bacon, and clothing, repeating “Yes’m” and “Yes, sir” during brutal fourteen-hour days for just fifty dollars a month. He lives in a shabby hotel room and must attend church because Rhodes controls that too. The tone is bitter and exhausted—Carman feels owned, humiliated, and trapped by work, poverty, and small-town power. The turning point comes while he ties his necktie and catches his own reflection: gray-haired, worn out, “like a sodden pie.” He curses himself as a coward and a slave until a burst blood vessel kills him. The poem creates a bleak, suffocating mood, mixing self-disgust with sorrow for an ordinary man crushed by someone else’s grip on his whole existence.
Eugene Carman — Summary
Rhodes’ slave! Selling shoes and gingham, Flour and bacon, overalls, clothing, all day long For fourteen hours a day for three hundred and thirteen days For more than twenty years. Saying “Yes’m” and “Yes, sir”, and “Thank you” A thousand times a day, and all for fifty dollars a month. Living in this stinking room in the rattle-trap “Commercial.” And compelled to go to Sunday School, and to listen To the Rev. Abner Peet one hundred and four times a year For more than an hour at a time, Because Thomas Rhodes ran the church As well as the store and the bank. So while I was tying my neck-tie that morning I suddenly saw myself in the glass: My hair all gray, my face like a sodden pie. So I cursed and cursed: You damned old thing You cowardly dog! You rotten pauper! You Rhodes’ slave! Till Roger Baughman Thought I was having a fight with some one, And looked through the transom just in time To see me fall on the floor in a heap From a broken vein in my head.