Spoon River Anthology

by Edgar Lee Masters

And sickness, and the face of Fear by the bed;

  The death of a father or mother;

  Or shame for them, or poverty;

  The maiden sorrow of school days ended;

  And eyeless Nature that makes you drink

  From the cup of Love, though you know it’s poisoned;

  To whom would your flower-face have been lifted?

  Botanist, weakling? Cry of what blood to yours?—

  Pure or foul, for it make no matter,

  It’s blood that calls to our blood.

  And then your children—oh, what might they be?

  And what your sorrow? Child! Child!

  Death is better than Life!

  EDITH CONANT

  WE stand about this place—we, the memories;

  And shade our eyes because we dread to read:

  “June 17th, 1884, aged 21 years and 3 days.”

  And all things are changed.

  And we—we, the memories, stand here for ourselves alone,

  For no eye marks us, or would know why we are here.

  Your husband is dead, your sister lives far away,

  Your father is bent with age;

  He has forgotten you, he scarcely leaves the house

  Any more.

  No one remembers your exquisite face,

  Your lyric voice!

  How you sang, even on the morning you were stricken,

  With piercing sweetness, with thrilling sorrow,

  Before the advent of the child which died with you.

  It is all forgotten, save by us, the memories,

  Who are forgotten by the world.

  All is changed, save the river and the hill—

  Even they are changed.

  Only the burning sun and the quiet stars are the same.

  And we—we, the memories, stand here in awe,

  Our eyes closed with the weariness of tears—

  In immeasurable weariness!

  CHARLES WEBSTER

  THE pine woods on the hill,

  And the farmhouse miles away,

  Showed clear as though behind a lens

  Under a sky of peacock blue!

  But a blanket of cloud by afternoon

  Muffled the earth. And you walked the road

  And the clover field, where the only sound

  Was the cricket’s liquid tremolo.

  Then the sun went down between great drifts

  Of distant storms. For a rising wind

  Swept clean the sky and blew the flames

  Of the unprotected stars;

  And swayed the russet moon,

  Hanging between the rim of the hill

  And the twinkling boughs of the apple orchard.

  You walked the shore in thought

  Where the throats of the waves were like whip-poor-wills

  Singing beneath the water and crying

  To the wash of the wind in the cedar trees,

  Till you stood, too full for tears, by the cot,

  And looking up saw Jupiter,

  Tipping the spire of the giant pine,

  And looking down saw my vacant chair,

  Rocked by the wind on the lonely porch—

  Be brave, Beloved!

  FATHER MALLOY

  YOU are over there, Father Malloy,

  Where holy ground is, and the cross marks every grave,

  Not here with us on the hill—

  Us of wavering faith, and clouded vision

  And drifting hope, and unforgiven sins.

  You were so human, Father Malloy,

  Taking a friendly glass sometimes with us,

  Siding with us who would rescue Spoon River

  From the coldness and the dreariness of village morality.

  You were like a traveler who brings a little box of sand

  From the wastes about the pyramids

  And makes them real and Egypt real.

  You were a part of and related to a great past,

  And yet you were so close to many of us.

  You believed in the joy of life.

  You did not seem to be ashamed of the flesh.

  You faced life as it is,

  And as it changes.

  Some of us almost came to you, Father Malloy,

  Seeing how your church had divined the heart,

  And provided for it,

  Through Peter the Flame,

  Peter the Rock.*

  AMI GREEN

  NOT “a youth with hoary head and haggard eye,”*

  But an old man with a smooth skin

  And black hair!

  I had the face of a boy as long as I lived,

  And for years a soul that was stiff and bent,

  In a world which saw me just as a jest,

  To be hailed familiarly when it chose,

  And loaded up as a man when it chose,

  Being neither man nor boy.

  In truth it was soul as well as body

  Which never matured, and I say to you

  That the much-sought prize of eternal youth

  Is just arrested growth.

  CALVIN CAMPBELL

  YE who are kicking against Fate,

  Tell me how it is that on this hill-side,

  Running down to the river,

  Which fronts the sun and the south-wind,

  This plant draws from the air and soil

  Poison and becomes poison ivy?

  And this plant draws from the same air and soil

  Sweet elixirs and colors and becomes arbutus?

  And both flourish?

  You may blame Spoon River for what it is,

  But whom do you blame for the will in you

  That feeds itself and makes you dock-weed,

  Jimpson, dandelion or mullen

  And which can never use any soil or air

  So as to make you jessamine or wistaria?

  HENRY LAYTON

  WHOEVER thou art who passest by

  Know that my father was gentle,

  And my mother was violent,

  While I was born the whole of such hostile halves,

  Not intermixed and fused,

  But each distinct, feebly soldered together.

  Some of you saw me as gentle,

  Some as violent,

  Some as both.

  But neither half of me wrought my ruin.

  It was the falling asunder of halves,

  Never a part of each other,

  That left me a lifeless soul.

  HARLAN SEWALL

  YOU never understood, O unknown one,

  Why it was I repaid

  Your devoted friendship and delicate ministrations

  First with diminished thanks,

  Afterward by gradually withdrawing my presence from you,

  So that I might not be compelled to thank you,

  And then with silence which followed upon

  Our final Separation.

  You had cured my diseased soul. But to cure it

  You saw my disease, you knew my secret,

  And that is why I fled from you.

  For though when our bodies rise from pain

  We kiss forever the watchful hands

  That gave us wormwood, while we shudder

  For thinking of the wormwood,

  A soul that’s cured is a different matter,

  For there we’d blot from memory

  The soft-toned words, the searching eyes,

  And stand forever oblivious,

  Not so much of the sorrow itself

  As of the hand that healed it.

  IPPOLIT KONOVALOFF

  I WAS a gun-smith in Odessa.

  One night the police broke in the room

  Where a group of us were reading Spencer.*

  And seized our books and arrested us.

  But I escaped and came to New York

  And thence to Chicago, and then to Spoon River,

  Where I could study my Kant in peace

  And eke out a living repairing gu
ns!

  Look at my moulds! My architectonics!

  One for a barrel, one for a hammer,

  And others for other parts of a gun!

  Well, now suppose no gun-smith living

  Had anything else but duplicate moulds

  Of these I show you—well, all guns

  Would be just alike, with a hammer to hit

  The cap and a barrel to carry the shot,

  All acting alike for themselves, and all

  Acting against each other alike.

  And there would be your world of guns!

  Which nothing could ever free from itself

  Except a Moulder with different moulds

  To mould the metal over.

  HENRY PHIPPS

  I WAS the Sunday school superintendent,

  The dummy president of the wagon works

  And the canning factory,

  Acting for Thomas Rhodes and the banking clique;

  My son the cashier of the bank,

  Wedded to Rhodes’ daughter,

  My week days spent in making money,

  My Sundays at church and in prayer.

  In everything a cog in the wheel of things-as-they-are:

  Of money, master and man, made white

  With the paint of the Christian creed.

  And then:

  The bank collapsed. I stood and looked at the wrecked machine—

  The wheels with blow-holes stopped with putty and painted;

  The rotten bolts, the broken rods;

  And only the hopper for souls fit to be used again

  In a new devourer of life, when newspapers, judges and money-magicians

  Build over again.

  I was stripped to the bone, but I lay in the Rock of Ages,

  Seeing now through the game, no longer a dupe,

  And knowing “the upright shall dwell in the land

  But the years of the wicked shall be shortened.”*

  Then suddenly, Dr. Meyers discovered

  A cancer in my liver.

  I was not, after all, the particular care of God!

  Why, even thus standing on a peak

  Above the mists through which I had climbed,

  And ready for larger life in the world,

  Eternal forces

  Moved me on with a push.

  HARRY WILMANS

  I WAS just turned twenty-one,

  And Henry Phipps, the Sunday-school superintendent,

  Made a speech in Bindle’s Opera House.

  “The honor of the flag must be upheld,” he said,

  “Whether it be assailed by a barbarous tribe of Tagalogs*

  Or the greatest power in Europe.”

  And we cheered and cheered the speech and the flag he waved

  As he spoke.

  And I went to the war in spite of my father,

  And followed the flag till I saw it raised

  By our camp in a rice field near Manila,

  And all of us cheered and cheered it.

  But there were flies and poisonous things;

  And there was the deadly water,

  And the cruel heat,

  And the sickening, putrid food;

  And the smell of the trench just back of the tents

  Where the soldiers went to empty themselves;

  And there were the whores who followed us, full of syphilis;

  And beastly acts between ourselves or alone,

  With bullying, hatred, degradation among us,

  And days of loathing and nights of fear

  To the hour of the charge through the steaming swamp,

  Following the flag,

  Till I fell with a scream, shot through the guts.

  Now there’s a flag over me in Spoon River!

  A flag! A flag!

  JOHN WASSON

  OH! the dew-wet grass of the meadow in North Carolina

  Through which Rebecca followed me wailing, wailing,

  One child in her arms, and three that ran along wailing,

  Lengthening out the farewell to me off to the war with the British,

  And then the long, hard years down to the day of Yorktown.

  And then my search for Rebecca,

  Finding her at last in Virginia,

  Two children dead in the meanwhile.

  We went by oxen to Tennessee,

  Thence after years to Illinois,

  At last to Spoon River.

  We cut the buffalo grass,

  We felled the forests,

  We built the school houses, built the bridges,

  Leveled the roads and tilled the fields

  Alone with poverty, scourges, death—

  If Harry Wilmans who fought the Filipinos

  Is to have a flag on his grave

  Take it from mine!

  MANY SOLDIERS

  THE idea danced before us as a flag;

  The sound of martial music;

  The thrill of carrying a gun;

  Advancement in the world on coming home;

  A glint of glory, wrath for foes;

  A dream of duty to country or to God.

  But these were things in ourselves, shining before us,

  They were not the power behind us,

  Which was the Almighty hand of Life,

  Like fire at earth’s center making mountains,

  Or pent up waters that cut them through.

  Do you remember the iron band

  The blacksmith, Shack Dye, welded

  Around the oak on Bennet’s lawn,

  From which to swing a hammock,

  That daughter Janet might repose in, reading

  On summer afternoons?

  And that the growing tree at last

  Sundered the iron band?

  But not a cell in all the tree

  Knew aught save that it thrilled with life,

  Nor cared because the hammock fell

  In the dust with Milton’s Poems.

  GODWIN JAMES

  HARRY WILMANS! You who fell in a swamp

  Near Manila, following the flag,

  You were not wounded by the greatness of a dream,

  Or destroyed by ineffectual work,

  Or driven to madness by Satanic snags;

  You were not torn by aching nerves,

  Nor did you carry great wounds to your old age.

  You did not starve, for the government fed you.

  You did not suffer yet cry “forward”

  To an army which you led

  Against a foe with mocking smiles,

  Sharper than bayonets. You were not smitten down

  By invisible bombs. You were not rejected

  By those for whom you were defeated.

  You did not eat the savorless bread

  Which a poor alchemy had made from ideals.

  You went to Manila, Harry Wilmans,

  While I enlisted in the bedraggled army

  Of bright-eyed, divine youths,

  Who surged forward, who were driven back and fell,

  Sick, broken, crying, shorn of faith,

  Following the flag of the Kingdom of Heaven.

  You and I, Harry Wilmans, have fallen

  In our several ways, not knowing

  Good from bad, defeat from victory,

  Nor what face it is that smiles

  Behind the demoniac mask.

  LYMAN KING

  YOU may think, passer-by, that Fate

  Is a pit-fall outside of yourself,

  Around which you may walk by the use of foresight

  And wisdom.

  Thus you believe, viewing the lives of other men,

  As one who in God-like fashion bends over an anthill,

  Seeing how their difficulties could be avoided.

  But pass on into life:

  In time you shall see Fate approach you

  In the shape of your own image in the mirror;

  Or you shall sit alone by your own hearth,

  And suddenly the chair by you
shall hold a guest,

  And you shall know that guest,

  And read the authentic message of his eyes.

  CAROLINE BRANSON

  WITH our hearts like drifting suns, had we but walked,

  As often before, the April fields till star-light

  Silkened over with viewless gauze the darkness

  Under the cliff, our trysting place in the wood,

  Where the brook turns! Had we but passed from wooing

  Like notes of music that run together, into winning,

  In the inspired improvisation of love!

  But to put back of us as a canticle ended

  The rapt enchantment of the flesh,

  In which our souls swooned, down, down,

  Where time was not, nor space, nor ourselves—

  Annihilated in love!

  To leave these behind for a room with lamps:

  And to stand with our Secret mocking itself,

  And hiding itself amid flowers and mandolins,

  Stared at by all between salad and coffee.

  And to see him tremble, and feel myself

  Prescient, as one who signs a bond—

  Not flaming with gifts and pledges heaped

  With rosy hands over his brow.

  And then, O night! deliberate! unlovely!

  With all of our wooing blotted out by the winning,

  In a chosen room in an hour that was known to all!

  Next day he sat so listless, almost cold,

  So strangely changed, wondering why I wept,

  Till a kind of sick despair and voluptuous madness

  Seized us to make the pact of death.

  A stalk of the earth-sphere,

  Frail as star-light;

  Waiting to be drawn once again

  Into creation’s stream.

  But next time to be given birth

  Gazed at by Raphael and St. Francis

  Sometimes as they pass.

  For I am their little brother,

  To be known clearly face to face

  Through a cycle of birth hereafter run.

  You may know the seed and the soil;

  You may feel the cold rain fall,

  But only the earth-sphere, only heaven

  Knows the secret of the seed

  In the nuptial chamber under the soil.

  Throw me into the stream again,

  Give me another trail—