aronatkins / home-poems

Home Poems by Daniel W. Hoyt

Home Poems

by Daniel W. Hoyt

This repository contains a transcription of the privately published collection of poetry. Daniel W. Hoyt is my great-great-grandfather. My grandmother, Ruth (Wheeler) Atkins, was the daughter of Ruth Williams (Hoyt) Wheeler, who was the daughter of Rev. Hoyt.

The biography in Home Poems mostly mirrors the information contained in his WikiTree entry.

The copy of Home Poems used for this transcription has been handed down through my family. My copy came from my father.

Transcription by Aron Chandler Atkins, November, 2018

What's here?

The text directory contains the original transcriptions; one file per poem. The poem titles in these files are all in uppercase, to match the book.

The docs directory contains the content hosted by GitHub Pages at https://aronatkins.github.io/home-poems/.

Markup conventions

Let's look at one stanza from "My Granddaughters":

<p>
    Ruthie, dear, you blushing rose,<br/>
    &emsp;  Have pity on a lover's woes,<br/>
    Were I a happy, healthy boy,<br/>
    &emsp;  I know where I would seek my joy.<br/>
    "Piggly, Wiggly, Sir," she said.
</p>

The <p> tag is used to mark the bounds of a stanza. This corresponds to a blank line between groups of poetry lines. The <br/> tag forces a line break within that "paragraph". The   asks that a "wide" space character be inserted before the next word and leaves us with the "ragged" style that is throughout Hoyt's poetry.

Here is that same block of poetry as it would appear in the book:

Ruthie, dear, you blushing rose,
  Have pity on a lover's woes,
Were I a happy, healthy boy,
  I know where I would seek my joy.
"Piggly, Wiggly, Sir," she said.