Spoon River Anthology

by Edgar Lee Masters

  And I stood alone, as I started alone!

  My valiant life! I died on my feet,

  Facing the silence—facing the prospect

  That no one would know of the fight I made.

  JUDGE SELAH LIVELY

  SUPPOSE you stood just five feet two,

  And had worked your way as a grocery clerk,

  Studying law by candle light

  Until you became an attorney at law?

  And then suppose through your diligence,

  And regular church attendance,

  You became attorney for Thomas Rhodes,

  Collecting notes and mortgages,

  And representing all the widows

  In the Probate Court? And through it all

  They jeered at your size, and laughed at your clothes

  And your polished boots? And then suppose

  You became the County Judge?

  And Jefferson Howard and Kinsey Keene,

  And Harmon Whitney, and all the giants

  Who had sneered at you, were forced to stand

  Before the bar and say “Your Honor”—

  Well, don’t you think it was natural

  That I made it hard for them?

  ALBERT SCHIRDING

  JONAS KEENE thought his lot a hard one

  Because his children were all failures.

  But I know of a fate more trying than that:

  It is to be a failure while your children are successes.

  For I raised a brood of eagles

  Who flew away at last, leaving me

  A crow on the abandoned bough.

  Then, with the ambition to prefix Honorable to my name,

  And thus to win my children’s admiration,

  I ran for County Superintendent of Schools,

  Spending my accumulations to win—and lost.

  That fall my daughter received first prize in Paris

  For her picture, entitled, “The Old Mill”—

  (It was of the water mill before Henry Wilkin put in steam.)

  The feeling that I was not worthy of her finished me.

  JONAS KEENE

  WHY did Albert Schirding kill himself

  Trying to be County Superintendent of Schools,

  Blest as he was with the means of life

  And wonderful children, bringing him honor

  Ere he was sixty?

  If even one of my boys could have run a news-stand,

  Or one of my girls could have married a decent man,

  I should not have walked in the rain

  And jumped into bed with clothes all wet,

  Refusing medical aid.

  EUGENIA TODD

  HAVE any of you, passers-by,

  Had an old tooth that was an unceasing discomfort?

  Or a pain in the side that never quite left you?

  Or a malignant growth that grew with time?

  So that even in profoundest slumber

  There was shadowy consciousness or the phantom of thought

  Of the tooth, the side, the growth?

  Even so thwarted love, or defeated ambition,

  Or a blunder in life which mixed your life

  Hopelessly to the end,

  Will like a tooth, or a pain in the side,

  Float through your dreams in the final sleep

  Till perfect freedom from the earth-sphere

  Comes to you as one who wakes

  Healed and glad in the morning!

  YEE BOW

  THEY got me into the Sunday-school

  In Spoon River

  And tried to get me to drop Confucius for Jesus.

  I could have been no worse off

  If I had tried to get them to drop Jesus for Confucius.

  For, without any warning, as if it were a prank,

  And sneaking up behind me, Harry Wiley,

  The minister’s son, caved my ribs into my lungs,

  With a blow of his fist.

  Now I shall never sleep with my ancestors in Pekin,*

  And no children shall worship at my grave.

  WASHINGTON MCNEELY

  RICH, honored by my fellow citizens,

  The father of many children, born of a noble mother,

  All raised there

  In the great mansion-house, at the edge of town.

  Note the cedar tree on the lawn!

  I sent all the boys to Ann Arbor, all the girls to Rockford,

  The while my life went on, getting more riches and honors—

  Resting under my cedar tree at evening.

  The years went on.

  I sent the girls to Europe;

  I dowered them when married.

  I gave the boys money to start in business.

  They were strong children, promising as apples

  Before the bitten places show.

  But John fled the country in disgrace.

  Jenny died in child-birth—

  I sat under my cedar tree.

  Harry killed himself after a debauch,

  Susan was divorced—

  I sat under my cedar tree.

  Paul was invalided from over study,

  Mary became a recluse at home for love of a man—

  I sat under my cedar tree.

  All were gone, or broken-winged or devoured by life—

  I sat under my cedar tree.

  My mate, the mother of them, was taken—

  I sat under my cedar tree,

  Till ninety years were tolled.

  O maternal Earth, which rocks the fallen leaf to sleep!

  PAUL MCNEELY

  DEAR Jane! dear winsome Jane!

  How you stole in the room (where I lay so ill)

  In your nurse’s cap and linen cuffs,

  And took my hand and said with a smile:

  “You are not so ill—you’ll soon be well.”

  And how the liquid thought of your eyes

  Sank in my eyes like dew that slips

  Into the heart of a flower.

  Dear Jane! the whole McNeely fortune

  Could not have bought your care of me,

  By day and night, and night and day;

  Nor paid for your smile, nor the warmth of your soul,

  In your little hands laid on my brow.

  Jane, till the flame of life went out

  In the dark above the disk of night

  I longed and hoped to be well again

  To pillow my head on your little breasts,

  And hold you fast in a clasp of love—

  Did my father provide for you when he died,

  Jane, dear Jane?

  MARY MCNEELY

  PASSER-BY,

  To love is to find your own soul

  Through the soul of the beloved one.

  When the beloved one withdraws itself from your soul

  Then you have lost your soul.

  It is written: “I have a friend,

  But my sorrow has no friend.”

  Hence my long years of solitude at the home of my father,

  Trying to get myself back,

  And to turn my sorrow into a supremer self.

  But there was my father with his sorrows,

  Sitting under the cedar tree,

  A picture that sank into my heart at last

  Bringing infinite repose.

  Oh, ye souls who have made life

  Fragrant and white as tube roses

  From earth’s dark soil,

  Eternal peace!

  DANIEL M’CUMBER

  WHEN I went to the city, Mary McNeely,

  I meant to return for you, yes I did.

  But Laura, my landlady’s daughter,

  Stole into my life somehow, and won me away.

  Then after some years whom should I meet

  But Georgine Miner from Niles—a sprout

  Of the free love, Fourierist gardens* that flourished

  Before the war all over Ohio.

  Her dilettante lover had tired of her,

 
And she turned to me for strength and solace.

  She was some kind of a crying thing

  One takes in one’s arms, and all at once

  It slimes your face with its running nose,

  And voids its essence all over you;

  Then bites your hand and springs away.

  And there you stand bleeding and smelling to heaven!

  Why, Mary McNeely, I was not worthy

  To kiss the hem of your robe!

  GEORGINE SAND MINER

  A STEP-MOTHER drove me from home, embittering me.

  A squaw-man, a flaneur and dilettante took my virtue.

  For years I was his mistress—no one knew.

  I learned from him the parasite cunning

  With which I moved with the bluffs, like a flea on a dog.

  All the time I was nothing but “very private” with different men.

  Then Daniel, the radical, had me for years.

  His sister called me his mistress;

  And Daniel wrote me: “Shameful word, soiling our beautiful love!”

  But my anger coiled, preparing its fangs.

  My Lesbian friend next took a hand.

  She hated Daniel’s sister.

  And Daniel despised her midget husband.

  And she saw a chance for a poisonous thrust:

  I must complain to the wife of Daniel’s pursuit!

  But before I did that I begged him to fly to London with me.

  “Why not stay in the city just as we have?” he asked.

  Then I turned submarine and revenged his repulse

  In the arms of my dilettante friend. Then up to the surface,

  Bearing the letter that Daniel wrote me,

  To prove my honor was all intact, showing it to his wife,

  My Lesbian friend and everyone.

  If Daniel had only shot me dead!

  Instead of stripping me named of lies,

  A harlot in body and soul!

  THOMAS RHODES*

  VERY well, you liberals,

  And navigators into realms intellectual,

  You sailors through heights imaginative,

  Blown about by erratic currents, tumbling into air pockets,

  You Margaret Fuller Slacks, Petits,

  And Tennessee Claflin Shopes—

  You found with all your boasted wisdom

  How hard at the last it is

  To keep the soul from splitting into cellular atoms.

  While we, seekers of earth’s treasures,

  Getters and hoarders of gold,

  Are self-contained, compact, harmonized,

  Even to the end.

  IDA CHICKEN

  AFTER I had attended lectures

  At our Chautauqua, and studied French

  For twenty years, committing the grammar

  Almost by heart,

  I thought I’d take a trip to Paris

  To give my culture a final polish.

  So I went to Peoria for a passport—

  (Thomas Rhodes was on the train that morning.)

  And there the clerk of the district Court

  Made me swear to support and defend

  The constitution—yes, even me—

  Who couldn’t defend or support it at all!

  And what do you think? That very morning

  The Federal Judge, in the very next room

  To the room where I took the oath,

  Decided the constitution

  Exempted Rhodes from paying taxes

  For the water works of Spoon River!

  PENNIWIT, THE ARTIST

  I LOST my patronage in Spoon River

  From trying to put my mind in the camera

  To catch the soul of the person.

  The very best picture I ever took

  Was of Judge Somers, attorney at law.

  He sat upright and had me pause

  Till he got his cross-eye straight.

  Then when he was ready he said “all right.”

  And I yell, “overruled” and his eye turned up.

  And I caught him just as he used to look

  When saying “I except.”*

  JIM BROWN

  WHILE I was handling Dom Pedro*

  I got at the thing that divides the race between men who are

  For singing “Turkey in the straw” or “There is a fountain filled with blood”—*

  (Like Rile Potter used to sing it over at Concord);

  For cards, or for Rev. Peet’s lecture on the holy land;

  For skipping the light fantastic, or passing the plate;

  For Pinafore,* or a Sunday school cantata;

  For men, or for money;

  For the people or against them.

  This was it:

  Rev. Peet and the Social Purity Club,

  Headed by Ben Pantier’s wife,

  Went to the Village trustees,

  And asked them to make me take Dom Pedro

  From the barn of Wash McNeely, there at the edge of town,

  To a barn outside of the corporation,

  On the ground that it corrupted public morals.

  Well, Ben Pantier and Fiddler Jones saved the day—

  They thought it a slam on colts.

  ROBERT DAVIDSON

  I GREW spiritually fat living off the souls of men.

  If I saw a soul that was strong

  I wounded its pride and devoured its strength.

  The shelters of friendship knew my cunning,

  For where I could steal a friend I did so.

  And wherever I could enlarge my power

  By undermining ambition, I did so,

  Thus to make smooth my own.

  And to triumph over other souls,

  Just to assert and prove my superior strength,

  Was with me a delight,

  The keen exhilaration of soul gymnastics.

  Devouring souls, I should have lived forever.

  But their undigested remains bred in me a deadly nephritis,

  With fear, restlessness, sinking spirits,

  Hatred, suspicion, vision disturbed.

  I collapsed at last with a shriek.

  Remember the acorn;

  It does not devour other acorns.

  ELSA WERTMAN

  I WAS a peasant girl from Germany,

  Blue-eyed, rosy, happy and strong.

  And the first place I worked was at Thomas Greene’s.

  On a summer’s day when she was away

  He stole into the kitchen and took me

  Right in his arms and kissed me on my throat,

  I turning my head. Then neither of us

  Seemed to know what happened.

  And I cried for what would become of me.

  And cried and cried as my secret began to show.

  One day Mrs. Greene said she understood,

  And would make no trouble for me,

  And, being childless, would adopt it.

  (He had given her a farm to be still.)

  So she hid in the house and sent out rumors,

  As if it were going to happen to her.

  And all went well and the child was born—They were so kind to me.

  Later I married Gus Wertman, and years passed. But—at political rallies when sitters-by thought I was crying At the eloquence of Hamilton Greene— That was not it. No! I wanted to say: That’s my son! That’s my son!

  HAMILTON GREENE

  I WAS the only child of Frances Harris of Virginia

  And Thomas Greene of Kentucky,

  Of valiant and honorable blood both.

  To them I owe all that I became,

  Judge, member of Congress, leader in the State.

  From my mother I inherited

  Vivacity, fancy, language;

  From my father will, judgment, logic.

  All honor to them

  For what service I was to the people!

  ERNEST HYDE

  MY mind was a mirror:

  It saw what it saw, it knew
what it knew.

  In youth my mind was just a mirror

  In a rapidly flying car,

  Which catches and loses bits of the landscape.

  Then in time

  Great scratches were made on the mirror,

  Letting the outside world come in,

  And letting my inner self look out.

  For this is the birth of the soul in sorrow,

  A birth with gains and losses.

  The mind sees the world as a thing apart,

  And the soul makes the world at one with itself.

  A mirror scratched reflects no image—

  And this is the silence of wisdom.

  ROGER HESTON

  OH many times did Ernest Hyde and I

  Argue about the freedom of the will.

  My favorite metaphor was Prickett’s cow

  Roped out to grass, and free you know as far

  As the length of the rope.

  One day while arguing so, watching the cow

  Pull at the rope to get beyond the circle

  Which she had eaten bare,

  Out came the stake, and tossing up her head,

  She ran for us.

  “What’s that, free-will or what?” said Ernest, running.

  I fell just as she gored me to my death.

  AMOS SIBLEY*

  NOT character, not fortitude, not patience

  Were mine, the which the village thought I had

  In bearing with my wife, while preaching on,

  Doing the work God chose for me.

  I loathed her as a termagant, as a wanton.

  I knew of her adulteries, every one.

  But even so, if I divorced the woman

  I must forsake the ministry.

  Therefore to do God’s work and have it crop,

  I bore with her!

  So lied I to myself!

  So lied I to Spoon River!

  Yet I tried lecturing, ran for the legislature,

  Canvassed for books, with just the thought in mind:

  If I make money thus, I will divorce her.

  MRS. SIBLEY