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PT045
[Typescript Poem] Market Day

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Mary Webb. “Market Day.” Typescript poem, two leaves, 10″ x 8″, thin off-white wove paper. Forty-two lines, one minor ink correction. “Mary Webb” is written in ink at the bottom of the second leaf. In “Market Day,” Webb captures the sights and sounds she encounters while walking to Shrewsbury market. Towards the end of the poem, Webb abruptly and dramatically changes tone and direction with blunt social commentary: “If all folk lived with labor sweet, / Of their own busy hands and feet, / Marketing, it seems to me, / Would make an end of poverty.”