Character guide

Paul

major

Paul moves through the poems as a figure of local speculation, a man who put on airs about a wife and kept her so entirely to himself that the whole countryside misjudged him. What Murphy witnesses — the two of them keeping house halfway up a cliff, the girl bright as a star and Paul dark as her shadow — recasts possessiveness as something closer to devotion. His fierce ownership, owning a wife meaning owning her, becomes the quiet engine of the poem's turn from gossip to wonder.

Arthur Amy

supporting

Also known as Art, The Arthur Amy

Arthur Amy belongs to the roll of Windham, Atkinson, Raymond, and Derry men the speaker invokes as proof that New Hampshire, whatever its little men, gave him friends he never found elsewhere. He stands among the glorious bards' targets — the people Massachusetts poets want to make over — and the narrator's refusal to improve them is a refusal to improve him. His presence anchors the poem's argument that art might almost wish such people worse rather than better.

Brad McLaughlin

supporting

Also known as Brad

Brad McLaughlin moves through the New Hampshire poems as part of the human furniture of the state — the kind of neighbor whose doings and sayings the narrator records without fuss. He belongs to the same landscape as the mansard-roofed friend who came back ashamed from selling rags in California, a world where trade soils a man and staying put is its own quiet virtue. His presence keeps the poems tethered to the ordinary lives the speaker claims to prefer unimproved.

Laban

supporting

Also known as this Laban

Laban belongs to the cast of New Hampshire specimens — one each of everything, as the poem says, kept in the state's show-case and not for sale. He is the sort of neighbor whose name the narrator drops without explanation, assuming a shared world of farms, crossroads, and long memory. His presence reinforces the poem's insistence that the state's real character lies in such men, not in Presidents or Daniel Webster.

Joe

minor

Also known as John - Joe

A common name used for a generic male character in multiple poems.

Mallice Huse

supporting

Also known as Huse

Mallice Huse appears among the named inhabitants who give the New Hampshire poems their sense of a place thick with specific, uncelebrated people. Like the townships named but without population, such figures are part of what the narrator means by specimens — one each of everything. Their accumulated particularity is the poem's answer to Emerson's taunt about lofty land and little men.

Old Davis

minor

Also known as Davis

An elderly character who appears in multiple poems.

Baptiste

supporting

Also known as Mrs. Baptiste

Baptiste lives cast away among Yankees, anxious to be given his human rating, and he uses the curves of his axe-helves to draw the narrator inside his house and his confidence. His wife, Mrs. Baptiste, rocks a chair with as many motions as the world and speaks little English, and the household's guarded warmth becomes the poem's real subject. Baptiste's defense of keeping his children from school turns a visit over an axe into a meditation on who has the right to doubt education.

Toffile

minor

A named character, possibly a local eccentric or farmer.

Clara Robinson

minor

A female character appearing in at least one poem.

Morgan

minor

A named character, possibly a neighbor or traveler.

Maple

minor

A personified or named character in the poem 'Maple'.

Mother

minor

A maternal figure appearing in several poems.

Murphy

minor

A named character, likely a local resident.

Eliza

minor

A female character appearing in at least one poem.

Mabel

minor

A named female character in a poem.

John Smith

minor

Also known as Smith, John

A generic name used for a character in a poem.

Orion

minor

A named character, possibly a mythological reference personified.

Son

minor

A young male character, possibly a child in a poem.

Rose

minor

A named female character in a poem.