Elizabeth Madox Roberts was born in Kentucky in 1881, and her writing often returns to rural speech, farm rhythms, and the hidden intensity of children’s inner lives. “The Pilaster” appeared in her early collection Under the Tree (1922), a book of short lyrics that often use a child’s voice. The poem begins with a girl or boy noticing the stone projections on a church wall—“pieces jutting out / Where corners of the walls begin”—and claiming one as “my little house.” That act of imagination is not simply playful. The child does not stand outside the pilaster and pretend; she feels herself enter its solid bricks and watches herself sitting inside.
The scene inside the imagined house is striking because it is so bare. There is a little chair, and the child sits in it “very still,” waiting “on and on.” The central idea is not that imagination offers escape, but that it creates a private room for longing. The speaker is “always waiting all alone” for something that is never there, for something already gone. Because the chosen space is part of a church, the absence carries a spiritual echo. The lost thing could be a person, an earlier security, or a sense of divine presence. Roberts wisely leaves it unnamed, so the waiting feels universal rather than confined to one story.
The poem’s construction supports that quiet, suspended feeling. It has three quatrains, and in each stanza the second and fourth lines rhyme simply: “in” with “begin,” “there” with “chair,” “gone” with “on.” The lines move mostly in a steady iambic tetrameter, which gives the voice a hushed, chant-like regularity, like a child murmuring a private game. The final line of the third stanza shortens to “For something that is gone,” and that sudden brevity closes the poem as if a door has shut. The imagery moves between hard architectural words and fragile domestic ones. “Pilaster” itself is an unusual word for a child’s poem, and its strangeness mirrors the way the child is drawn to the church’s jutting shapes. Words such as “corners” and “bricks” give the structure weight, while “little house” and “little chair” shrink that weight into a child’s scale. The repeated “I feel” and “I see” are important: the speaker experiences the imagined entrance from outside and inside at once, so the imaginary room becomes more vivid than the actual wall.
What makes “The Pilaster” significant is its refusal to soften childhood into simple innocence. Roberts uses a real architectural detail—a pilaster is a support or decoration projecting from a wall—and turns it into an interior life. That interior is not filled with games, toys, or companionship, but with stillness, solitude, and expectation. The word “waiting” appears three times, and the final two adjectives, “never there” and “gone,” make absence permanent. The child has built a small house inside solid brick, yet inside it she can only wait. For school readers, the poem is a useful example of how direct language and a simple rhyme scheme can carry complex emotion. It looks like a nursery rhyme, but it packs the ache of grief or spiritual loss into a few plain images. By the end, the pilaster is no longer merely part of a church wall; it is a figure for the inner room everyone carries—a place where a person sits very still and waits for something that cannot return.