Life's Pleasures Quote by Ernest Poole

A quiet act of political arithmetic: take the comforts of “them” and itemize the unpaid infrastructure that makes it possible. Poole’s sentence is built like an inventory ledger, but it reads like an indictment. Flax, grain, meat, wool, trees, firewood - each clause stacks another basic necessity onto the rural side of the scale, until “they” starts to look less like a neighbor and more like a class that lives downstream of other people’s labor.

The intent is not pastoral pride. The diction refuses romance. “Raise,” “cut,” “heat” are work verbs, practical and repetitive, and the repetition is the point: this is ceaseless production, not a seasonal idyll. Poole’s shrewdest move is the pronouns. “Here” establishes a grounded, local speaker; “they” stays abstract, distant, unreciprocal. The subtext is dependency masked as superiority. Urban or industrial “they” may command markets and politics, but the speaker controls the inputs of life itself.

Context matters. Poole, a Progressive Era novelist with a journalist’s eye for systems, is writing in a moment when America is renegotiating power between farm, factory, and city - and when resentment about who benefits from modernization is becoming its own kind of fuel. The line anticipates a familiar American argument: the people who “make things real” are asked to accept cultural condescension and economic disadvantage as the price of being essential. It works because it doesn’t plead; it enumerates. The moral force comes from the fact that nothing here is optional.