Spoon River Anthology

by Edgar Lee Masters

  Save me, Shelley!

  ANNE RUTLEDGE

  OUT of me unworthy and unknown

  The vibrations of deathless music;

  “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”*

  Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,

  And the beneficent face of a nation

  Shining with justice and truth.

  I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,

  Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,*

  Wedded to him, not through union,

  But through separation.

  Bloom forever, O Republic,

  From the dust of my bosom!

  HAMLET MICURE

  IN a lingering fever many visions come to you:

  I was in the little house again

  With its great yard of clover

  Running down to the board-fence,

  Shadowed by the oak tree,

  Where we children had our swing.

  Yet the little house was a manor hall

  Set in a lawn, and by the lawn was the sea.

  I was in the room where little Paul

  Strangled from diphtheria,

  But yet it was not this room—

  It was a sunny verandah enclosed

  With mullioned windows,

  And in a chair sat a man in a dark cloak,

  With a face like Euripides.

  He had come to visit me, or I had gone to visit him—

  I could not tell.

  We could hear the beat of the sea, the clover nodded

  Under a summer wind, and little Paul came

  With clover blossoms to the window and smiled.

  Then I said: “What is ‘divine despair,’ Alfred?”

  “Have you read ‘Tears, Idle Tears’?”* he asked.

  “Yes, but you do not there express divine despair.”

  “My poor friend,” he answered, “that was why the despair

  Was divine.”

  MABEL OSBORNE

  YOUR red blossoms amid green leaves

  Are drooping, beautiful geranium!

  But you do not ask for water.

  You cannot speak! You do not need to speak—

  Everyone knows that you are dying of thirst,

  Yet they do not bring water!

  They pass on, saying:

  “The geranium wants water.”

  And I, who had happiness to share

  And longed to share your happiness;

  I who loved you, Spoon River,

  And craved your love,

  Withered before your eyes, Spoon River—

  Thirsting, thirsting,

  Voiceless from chasteness of soul to ask you for love,

  You who knew and saw me perish before you,

  Like this geranium which someone has planted over me,

  And left to die.

  WILLIAM H. HERNDON*

  THERE by the window in the old house

  Perched on the bluff, overlooking miles of valley,

  My days of labor closed, sitting out life’s decline,

  Day by day did I look in my memory,

  As one who gazes in an enchantress’ crystal globe,

  And I saw the figures of the past,

  As if in a pageant glassed by a shining dream,

  Move through the incredible sphere of time.

  And I saw a man* arise from the soil like a fabled giant

  And throw himself over a deathless destiny,

  Master of great armies, head of the republic,

  Bringing together into a dithyramb of recreative song

  The epic hopes of a people;

  At the same time Vulcan of sovereign fires,

  Where imperishable shields and swords were beaten out

  From spirits tempered in heaven.

  Look in the crystal! See how he hastens on

  To the place where his path comes up to the path

  Of a child of Plutarch and Shakespeare.

  O Lincoln, actor indeed, playing well your part,

  And Booth, who strode in a mimic play within the play,

  Often and often I saw you,

  As the cawing crows winged their way to the wood

  Over my house-top at solemn sunsets,

  There by my window,

  Alone.

  REBECCA WASSON

  SPRING and Summer, Fall and Winter and Spring,

  After each other drifting, past my window drifting!

  And I lay so many years watching them drift and counting

  The years till a terror came in my heart at times,

  With the feeling that I had become eternal; at last

  My hundredth year was reached! And still I lay

  Hearing the tick of the clock, and the low of cattle

  And the scream of a jay flying through falling leaves!

  Day after day alone in a room of the house

  Of a daughter-in-law stricken with age and gray.

  And by night, or looking out of the window by day

  My thought ran back, it seemed, through infinite time

  To North Carolina and all my girlhood days,

  And John, my John, away to the war with the British,

  And all the children, the deaths, and all the sorrows.

  And that stretch of years like a prairie in Illinois

  Through which great figures passed like hurrying horsemen,

  Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Webster, Clay.

  O beautiful young republic for whom my John and I

  Gave all of our strength and love!

  And O my John!

  Why, when I lay so helpless in bed for years,

  Praying for you to come, was your coming delayed?

  Seeing that with a cry of rapture, like that I uttered

  When you found me in old Virginia after the war,

  I cried when I beheld you there by the bed,

  As the sun stood low in the west growing smaller and fainter

  In the light of your face!

  RUTHERFORD MCDOWELL

  THEY brought me ambrotypes*

  Of the old pioneers to enlarge.

  And sometimes one sat for me—

  Some one who was in being

  When giant hands from the womb of the world

  Tore the republic.

  What was it in their eyes?—

  For I could never fathom

  That mystical pathos of drooped eyelids,

  And the serene sorrow of their eyes.

  It was like a pool of water,

  Amid oak trees at the edge of a forest,

  Where the leaves fall,

  As you hear the crow of a cock

  From a far-off farm house, seen near the hills

  Where the third generation lives, and the strong men

  And the strong women are gone and forgotten.

  And these grand-children and great grand-children

  Of the pioneers!

  Truly did my camera record their faces, too,

  With so much of the old strength gone,

  And the old faith gone,

  And the old mastery of life gone,

  And the old courage gone,

  Which labors and loves and suffers and sings

  Under the sun!

  HANNAH ARMSTRONG

  I WROTE him a letter asking him for old times’ sake

  To discharge my sick boy from the army;

  But maybe he couldn’t read it.

  Then I went to town and had James Garber,

  Who wrote beautifully, write him a letter;

  But maybe that was lost in the mails.

  So I traveled all the way to Washington.

  I was more than an hour finding the White House.

  And when I found it they turned me away,

  Hiding their smiles. Then I thought:

  “Oh, well, he ain’t the same as when I boarded him

  And he and my husband worked together

  And all of us called him Abe,
there in Menard.”

  As a last attempt I turned to a guard and said:

  “Please say it’s old Aunt Hannah Armstrong

  From Illinois, come to see him about her sick boy

  In the army.”

  Well, just in a moment they let me in!

  And when he saw me he broke in a laugh,

  And dropped his business as president,

  And wrote in his own hand Doug’s discharge,

  Talking the while of the early days,

  And telling stories.

  LUCINDA MATLOCK

  I WENT to the dances at Chandlerville,

  And played snap-out at Winchester.

  One time we changed partners,

  Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,

  And then I found Davis.

  We were married and lived together for seventy years,

  Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,

  Eight of whom we lost

  Ere I had reached the age of sixty.

  I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,

  I made the garden, and for holiday

  Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,

  And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,

  And many a flower and medicinal weed—

  Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.

  At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,

  And passed to a sweet repose.

  What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,

  Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?

  Degenerate sons and daughters,

  Life is too strong for you—

  It takes life to love Life.

  DAVIS MATLOCK

  SUPPOSE it is nothing but the hive:

  That there are drones and workers

  And queens, and nothing but storing honey—

  (Material things as well as culture and wisdom)—

  For the next generation, this generation never living,

  Except as it swarms in the sun-light of youth,

  Strengthening its wings on what has been gathered,

  And tasting, on the way to the hive

  From the clover field, the delicate spoil.

  Suppose all this, and suppose the truth:

  That the nature of man is greater

  Than nature’s need in the hive;

  And you must bear the burden of life,

  As well as the urge from your spirit’s excess—

  Well, I say to live it out like a god

  Sure of immortal life, though you are in doubt,

  Is the way to live it.

  If that doesn’t make God proud of you,

  Then God is nothing but gravitation,

  Or sleep is the golden goal.

  HERMAN ALTMAN

  DID I follow Truth wherever she led,

  And stand against the whole world for a cause,

  And uphold the weak against the strong?

  If I did I would be remembered among men

  As I was known in life among the people,

  And as I was hated and loved on earth,

  Therefore, build no monument to me,

  And carve no bust for me,

  Lest, though I become not a demi-god,

  The reality of my soul be lost,

  So that thieves and liars,

  Who were my enemies and destroyed me,

  And the children of thieves and liars,

  May claim me and affirm before my bust

  That they stood with me in the days of my defeat.

  Build me no monument

  Lest my memory be perverted to the uses

  Of lying and oppression.

  My lovers and their children must not be dispossessed of me;

  I would be the untarnished possession forever

  Of those for whom I lived.

  JENNIE M’GREW

  NOT, where the stairway turns in the dark,

  A hooded figure, shriveled under a flowing cloak!

  Not yellow eyes in the room at night,

  Staring out from a surface of cobweb gray!

  And not the flap of a condor wing,

  When the roar of life in your ears begins

  As a sound heard never before!

  But on a sunny afternoon,

  By a country road,

  Where purple rag-weeds bloom along a straggling fence,

  And the field is gleaned, and the air is still,

  To see against the sun-light something black,

  Like a blot with an iris rim—

  That is the sign to eyes of second sight. . . .

  And that I saw!

  COLUMBUS CHENEY

  THIS weeping willow!

  Why do you not plant a few

  For the millions of children not yet born,

  As well as for us?

  Are they not non-existent, or cells asleep

  Without mind?

  Or do they come to earth, their birth

  Rupturing the memory of previous being?

  Answer! The field of unexplored intuition is yours.

  But in any case why not plant willows for them,

  As well as for us?

  WALLACE FERGUSON

  THERE at Geneva where Mt. Blanc floated above

  The wine-hued lake like a cloud, when a breeze was blown

  Out of an empty sky of blue, and the roaring Rhone

  Hurried under the bridge through chasms of rock;

  And the music along the cafés was part of the splendor

  Of dancing water under a torrent of light;

  And the purer part of the genius of Jean Rousseau*

  Was the silent music of all we saw or heard—

  There at Geneva, I say, was the rapture less

  Because I could not link myself with the I of yore,

  When twenty years before I wandered about Spoon River?

  Nor remember what I was nor what I felt?

  We live in the hour all free of the hours gone by.

  Therefore, O soul, if you lose yourself in death,

  And wake in some Geneva by some Mt. Blanc,

  What do you care if you know not yourself as the you

  Who lived and loved in a little corner of earth

  Known as Spoon River ages and ages vanished?

  MARIE BATESON

  YOU observe the carven hand

  With the index finger pointing heavenward.

  That is the direction, no doubt.

  But how shall one follow it?

  It is well to abstain from murder and lust,

  To forgive, do good to others, worship God

  Without graven images.

  But these are external means after all

  By which you chiefly do good to yourself.

  The inner kernel is freedom,

  It is light, purity—

  I can no more,

  Find the goal or lose it, according to your vision.

  TENNESSEE CLAFLIN SHOPE

  I WAS the laughing-stock of the village,

  Chiefly of the people of good sense, as they call themselves—

  Also of the learned, like Rev. Peet, who read Greek

  The same as English.

  For instead of talking free trade,

  Or preaching some form of baptism;

  Instead of believing in the efficacy

  Of walking cracks—picking up pins the right way,

  Seeing the new moon over the right shoulder,

  Or curing rheumatism with blue glass,

  I asserted the sovereignty of my own soul.

  Before Mary Baker G. Eddy* even got started

  With what she called science

  I had mastered the “Bhagavad Gita,”*

  And cured my soul, before Mary

  Began to cure bodies with souls—

  Peace to all worlds!

  PLYMOUTH ROCK JOE

  WHY are you running so fast hither and thither

  Chasing midg
es or butterflies?

  Some of you are standing solemnly scratching for grubs;

  Some of you are waiting for corn to be scattered.

  This is life, is it?

  Cock-a-doodle-do! Very well, Thomas Rhodes,

  You are cock of the walk, no doubt.

  But here comes Elliott Hawkins,

  Gluck, Gluck, Gluck, attracting political followers.

  Quah! quah! quah! why so poetical, Minerva,

  This gray morning?

  Kittie—quah—quah! for shame, Lucius Atherton,

  The raucous squawk you evoked from the throat

  Of Aner Clute will be taken up later

  By Mrs. Benjamin Pantier as a cry

  Of votes for women: Ka dook—dook!

  What inspiration has come to you, Margaret Fuller Slack?

  And why does your gooseberry eye

  Flit so liquidly, Tennessee Claflin Shope?

  Are you trying to fathom the esotericism of an egg?

  Your voice is very metallic this morning, Hortense Robbins—

  Almost like a guinea hen’s!

  Quah! That was a guttural sigh, Isaiah Beethoven;

  Did you see the shadow of the hawk,

  Or did you step upon the drumsticks

  Which the cook threw out this morning?

  Be chivalric, heroic, or aspiring,

  Metaphysical, religious, or rebellious,

  You shall never get out of the barnyard

  Except by way of over the fence

  Mixed with potato peelings and such into the trough!

  IMANUEL EHRENHARDT*

  I BEGAN with Sir William Hamilton’s lectures.

  Then studied Dugald Stewart;

  And then John Locke on the Understanding,

  And then Descartes, Fichte and Schelling,

  Kant and then Schopenhauer—

  Books I borrowed from old Judge Somers.

  All read with rapturous industry

  Hoping it was reserved to me

  To grasp the tail of the ultimate secret,

  And drag it out of its hole.

  My soul flew up ten thousand miles,

  And only the moon looked a little bigger.

  Then I fell back, how glad of the earth!

  All through the soul of William Jones