House By The Railroad

Edward Hopper’s painting, House by the Railroad, portrays the isolation and vacancy of an abandoned Victorian mansion. Paired up with the poem, Edward Hirsch brought the mansion to life with vivid use of personification and imagery. By tying in my perceptions from both pieces of art, I got the impression that society abandoned the mansion for a sole purpose, particularly one that left the mansion “feeling” out of place and useless. When I first saw the painting, my attention immediately geared towards the shading of the mansion. The shading of the mansion sets the mood for the picture, forming a paradox that helps us infer the underlying meanings of the artist’s depiction. Despite that sunlight is irradiating the left side of the mansion, a majority of the mansion is still casted pitch-black from the shadow.

Several other details I noticed about the house include its old-fashioned, Victorian-styled architecture, dull colors, placement, and vacancy. The artist portrayed the house as an old-fashioned, Victorian-styled architecture to imply that it use to belong to an era, an unmodernized era in which people were once drawn to the attraction and purposes of the house. However, as people’s needs change and technology advances throughout time, the mansion’s once remarkable appearance lost its beauty, appearing rather “strange” and “gawky”(142), as depicted in Hirsch’s poem. Hirsch uses words like “strange” and “gawky”(142) to describe how the house appears outdated and out of place. His unique diction signifies the coming of a new phase when architectural design values and preferences change. Furthermore, the artist placed the house adjacent to the railroad. When I think of a railroad, the first phrase that pops up in my head is industrial change. The world was not blessed with