The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay

The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay presents The Deacon’s Masterpiece, the most famous comic poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894), in an illustrated edition with companion pieces. The poem, first published in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table in 1858, tells of the deacon who built a one-horse shay so perfectly that no single part could fail before any other, with the result that the whole carriage collapsed into dust at once, exactly one hundred years to the day after its building. The poem has long been read as a satire on the collapse of Calvinist theology in New England, though it works equally well as pure comic fable. It remains one of the most anthologised American poems of the nineteenth century. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.