Old Mr. Marblehall by Eudora Welty Lyrics

There is Mr. Marblehall’s ancestral home. It’s not so wonderfully large—it has only four
columns—but you always look toward it, the way you always glance into tunnels and see
nothing. The river is after it now, and the little back garden has assuredly crumbled away,
but the box maze is there on the edge like a trap, to confound the Mississippi River. Deep
in the red wall waits the front door—it weighs such a lot, it is perfectly solid, all one
piece, black mahogany…. And you see—one of them is always going in it. There is a
knocker shaped like a gasping fish on the door. You have every reason in the world to
imagine the inside is dark, with old things about. There’s many a big, deathly-looking
tapestry, wrinkling and thin, many a sofa shaped like an S. Brocades as tall as the wicked
queens in Italian tales stand gathered before the windows. Everything is draped and
hooded and shaded, of course, unaffectionate but close. Such rosy lamps! The only sound
would be a breath against the prisms, a stirring of the chandelier. It’s like old eyelids, the
house with one of its shutters, in careful working order, slowly opening outward.