Anyone who has ever owned a house with a screen door will recognise the battle George Burnett Devine stages in "The Old Screen Door." It is a poem about a repair job that never ends, told with the cheerful exasperation of someone who has long since stopped expecting to win. Its central idea is simple and very human: some problems are not solved but merely managed, and the best response may be to laugh at them.
The opening stanza sets the tone with a shout. "Whoopie! Whoopie! Whoopie!" sounds like a boy let out of school, and the speaker claims that "we are havin' lots of fun, / Fixin' the old screen door!" The irony is plain. Nobody genuinely enjoys this chore, and the gap between the whooping and the work is where the humour begins. The enthusiasm is mock-enthusiasm, the kind you put on when the alternative is grumbling. Summer arrives, and so does the annual duty.
From there the poem works like a catalogue of failures, each stanza describing a fix that creates a new fault. Wire bracing makes the door "stall." A lath nailed across the top and some string lacing give a spell of smooth running, but then "the spring runs out of spring", a neat little pun that repeats the word and drains it of its meaning at the same time. Hinges are oiled, a hole is patched with tin, and still the door "hangs ajar / And lets the flies come in." The comedy lies in the escalating cycle: every repair buys a moment of hope, and every moment of hope is punished. Notice how the verbs pile up, "sticks, it wiggles, binds and jams", a rattling list that mimics the door's own clumsy misbehaviour. The door is almost a character, a stubborn creature with a will of its own, and the final insult of the fifth stanza gives it a personality at its meanest: just when you are in a hurry, it "bangs you on the nose."
The language does a lot of the work. The speaker talks in a relaxed, rural-sounding dialect: "havin'," "fixin'," "runnin'," "missin'," "acrost," "that there door," "the blamed thing," "by gosh." These dropped consonants and homespun expressions make the poem sound like talk on a porch rather than writing on a page. Even the speaker's mild swearing is softened into "blamed" and "by gosh," which keeps the grumbling friendly and family-safe. The voice feels like a neighbour who has told this story many times and enjoys it more with each telling.
Formally, the poem is tidy. It is built from six quatrains with a regular ballad-like beat, alternating longer and shorter lines, and an ABCB rhyme scheme in which only the second and fourth lines rhyme ("once more" / "door," "all" / "stall"). That looseness suits the subject. A more polished rhyme scheme would feel too smooth for a poem about something that jams, and the bouncing rhythm carries you along as quickly as a told joke. Devine also plays with expectation in the rhymes. "Close" is paired with "nose," and the arrival of the second word, with its small physical sting, is the punchline the first one set up.
The last stanza is the cleverest. The speaker pretends to give advice: "You ask me how to fix it? / Sure old pal, just listen." We settle in for the solution, and the poem pulls the rug away. The answer is "by gosh, the answer's missin'." The line breaks the rhythm and leaves the expected rhyme unmet, so the reader feels the absence of a solution in the sound of the verse itself, a joke told through structure as well as meaning.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about everyday frustration. It makes no grand claims, yet it captures something true about household life, and about life in general: the sense that effort does not always lead to a fix. By refusing to supply an answer, it turns a small domestic annoyance into a shared, good-humoured shrug. The poem says that when the door will not close, you can at least whoop about it.