House by The Railroad

What was progress for some was decline for others, and what remained after the storm, so to speak, was a truly abandoned structure: Hopper's Victorian house is closed, isolated, sitting in a seemingly permanent shadow; Hirsch imagines it as "someone who is about to be left alone / Again, and can't take it".

Both painter and writer, implicitly and explicitly, take the artist as an additional subject in these works. Hopper does this largely through his interpretation of the scene; Hirsch includes the painter - "the man behind the easel... brutal as sunlight" - more explicitly; both men explore the artist's role in the meaning of the historical moment. And perhaps both succeed in offering solace in the beauty of their forms.

This lesson invites a close reading of Hopper's painting and Hirsch's poem in order to explore the kinds of emotions each work generates in the viewer or reader, and how the painter and poet have achieved these responses.