Life & Wisdom Quote by Will Carleton

Carleton lands the punch with a farmer's inventory of biblical plagues, then reveals the modern calamity that makes them look almost quaint. Worms, beetles, drought, tempest: these are the old adversaries, the kind you can curse at the sky and then fight with grit, neighbors, and luck. They are random, seasonal, even narratively satisfying. You endure them, and if you survive, the land is still yours.

Then comes the mortgage, and the poem pivots from nature's violence to paperwork's. The line "beats 'em all" is comic in its bluntness, but it's also an indictment: the worst threat to agrarian life isn't weather; it's finance. Carleton's intent isn't just to say debt is hard. It's to expose how a seemingly rational institution turns the farmer's relationship to land into a relationship to liability. A storm ruins crops; a mortgage can ruin ownership, identity, and continuity. It doesn't end when the clouds pass.

The subtext carries a class critique without sermonizing. Nature's disasters are indiscriminate; mortgages are targeted and structural. They arrive wearing respectability, backed by courts and contracts, and they keep winning because they don't require catastrophe to collect. In late-19th-century America, when farmers were being squeezed by credit, rail rates, and volatile markets, this couplet reads like populist poetry: a tight, rhymed warning that the "civilized" economy has invented a predator more efficient than any insect.