Pine Tree Ballads

Pine Tree Ballads offers a vivid, affectionate portrait of rural Maine, where hard work, plain speech, and stubborn character become the stuff of poetry. Holman F. Day turns farmers, fishermen, lumbermen, and village eccentrics into memorable comic and sentimental figures, celebrating Yankee wit while exposing greed, vanity, and hypocrisy with a sharp dialect edge. From "Feedin' the Stock" and "John W. Jones" to "The Sun-Browned Dads of Maine," the poems honor labor as moral worth, especially the fathers whose backbreaking work gives their children a future. Other verses move between rustic camp life, Thanksgiving generosity, and the old home place, where duty, memory, and family tenderness linger. The collection also revels in outrageous humor: moneylenders, misers, braggarts, wrestlers, and domineering farmers are outwitted by cleverness, irony, or sheer chaos. O'Connor, Ozy B. Orr, and other larger-than-life woodsmen drive the action through steamboats, trains, wrestling rings, and logging camps, while slapstick adventures and frontier excess keep the pace lively. Beneath the laughter, the book insists that true dignity lies in compassion, endurance, and the quiet heroism of ordinary people. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.