A house glimpsed from a moving train usually earns no more than a shrug, yet Louise Morey Bowman, a Canadian poet born in 1882 and active in early twentieth-century magazines, turns that fleeting encounter into a small moral drama in “Sympathy.” Writing when modern poetry was learning to value direct imagery and conversational speech, Bowman shares that idiom: her poem is built from plain words, a vivid colour, and the ordinary motion of wondering about strangers.
The speaker sees “that ugly pumpkin-coloured house” from the train and cannot settle into easy contempt. The central question is not whether the colour is beautiful, but whether the people inside can live happily with it. She wonders about “the minds of the people inside,” then admits she wonders “in vain,” because the train grants no answers. The poem’s energy comes from trying to close that distance anyway. “Did they choose that paint?” she asks, sensing the possibility that the choice was not wholly free: “Or perhaps it was brought them to buy.” The awkward phrasing suggests something done to them, a decision nudged by salesmanship or circumstance. From that doubt, sympathy grows. She hopes they have “got it all done that they like it” and are not merely trying to convince themselves. The poem argues that noticing another life, even for a second, can change judgment into care.
The form follows this movement of thought rather than imposing a strict shape. The lines are uneven, some short and others sprawling, and the rhymes arrive irregularly—“train” with “vain,” “buy” with “try,” “night” with “bright.” This loose music feels like thought pausing, catching itself, then pushing forward. The dash after “paint” and after the imagined speech keeps the syntax open. Rhythmically, the poem mixes quiet iambic phrases such as “That I saw from the train” with longer, almost breathless lines like “Oh I hope now they’ve got it all done that they like it.” The effect is not formal polish but urgent, conversational sympathy.
The key image is the house itself. “Pumpkin-coloured” is a wonderfully double word: it names a colour that is garish on a house, but it also carries warmth, harvest, and homely abundance. The speaker’s hope transforms the image. Against “sunny green fields,” the house becomes a glowing presence, and the simile “Like a lantern at night” turns it from an eyesore into a beacon. On “dull rainy days,” she imagines the couple saying, “Don’t it look nice and bright?” The ungrammatical “Don’t it” matters because it is not the speaker’s refined voice; it is an imagined, affectionate voice belonging to the people inside. “Nice and bright” answers the earlier word “ugly” without erasing it. The final phrase, “new-painted house,” repeats the object but with new tenderness, and the exclamation “Oh I think I shall never forget them” gives the strangers a permanent place in memory.
The poem’s significance lies in that reversal. It refuses the easy satire of rural taste. What begins as aesthetic judgment becomes an exercise in sympathetic imagination. The speaker will not stay outside the house, sneering at its colour; she mentally moves indoors, into the couple’s quiet pride and possible regret. The title proves itself without sententiousness: sympathy here is not pity but the effort to feel another’s satisfaction as if it were one’s own. That is why the final line can sound so earnest and still feel earned.