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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1280 ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Spoon River Anthology
+
+by Edgar Lee Masters
+
+
+Contents
+
+A
+
+Altman, Herman
+Armstrong, Hannah
+Arnett, Harold
+Arnett, Justice
+Atheist, The Village
+Atherton, Lucius
+
+B
+
+Ballard, John
+Barker, Amanda
+Barrett, Pauline
+Bartlett, Ezra
+Bateson, Marie
+Beatty, Tom
+Beethoven, Isaiah
+Bennett, Hon. Henry
+Bindle, Nicholas
+Bliss, Mrs. Charles
+Blood, A. D.
+Bloyd, Wendell P.
+Bone, Richard
+Branson, Caroline
+Brown, Jim
+Brown, Sarah
+Browning, Elijah
+Burke, Robert Southey
+Burleson, John Horace
+Butler, Roy
+
+C
+
+Cabanis, Flossie
+Cabanis, John
+Calhoun, Granville
+Calhoun, Henry C.
+Campbell, Calvin
+Carlisle, Jeremy
+Carman, Eugene
+Cheney, Columbus
+Chicken, Ida
+Childers, Elizabeth
+Church, John M.
+Churchill, Alfonso
+Clapp, Homer
+Clark, Nellie
+Clute, Aner
+Compton, Seth
+Conant, Edith
+Culbertson, E. C.
+
+D
+
+Davidson, Robert
+Dement, Silas
+Dippold the Optician
+Dixon, Joseph
+Dobyns, Batterton
+Drummer, Frank
+Drummer, Hare
+Dunlap, Enoch
+Dye, Shack
+
+E
+
+Ehrenhardt, Imanuel
+Epilogue
+
+F
+
+Fallas, State’s Attorney
+Fawcett, Clarence
+Ferguson, Wallace
+Findlay, Anthony
+Fluke, Willard
+Foote, Searcy
+Ford, Webster
+Fraser, Benjamin
+Fraser, Daisy
+French, Charlie
+Frickey, Ida
+
+G
+
+Garber, James
+Gardner, Samuel
+Garrick, Amelia
+Godbey, Jacob
+Goldman, Le Roy
+Goode, William
+Goodhue, Harry Carey
+Goodpasture, Jacob
+Graham, Magrady
+Gray, George
+Green, Ami
+Greene, Hamilton
+Griffy, The Cooper
+Gustine, Dorcas
+
+H
+
+Hainsfeather, Barney
+Hamblin, Carl
+Hately, Constance
+Hatfield, Aaron
+Hawkins, Elliott
+Hawley, Jeduthan
+Henry, Chase
+Herndon, William H.
+Heston, Roger
+Higbie, Archibald
+Hill, Doc
+Hill, The
+Hoheimer, Knowlt
+Holden, Barry
+Hookey, Sam
+Houghton, Jonathan
+Howard, Jefferson
+Hueffer, Cassius
+Hummel, Oscar
+Humphrey, Lydia
+Hurley, Scholfield
+Hutchins, Lambert
+Hyde, Ernest
+
+I
+
+Iseman, Dr. Siegfried
+
+J
+
+Jack, Blind
+James, Godwin
+Joe, Plymouth Rock
+Johnson, Voltaire
+Jones, Fiddler
+Jones, Franklin
+Jones, Indignation
+Jones, Minerva
+Jones, William
+Judge, The Circuit
+
+K
+
+Karr, Elmer
+Keene, Jonas
+Kessler, Bert
+Kessler, Mrs.
+Killion, Captain Orlando
+Kincaid, Russell
+King, Lyman
+Keene, Kinsey
+Knapp, Nancy
+Konovaloff, Ippolit
+Kritt, Dow
+
+L
+
+Layton, Henry
+Lively, Judge Selah
+
+M
+
+M’Cumber, Daniel
+McDowell, Rutherford
+McFarlane, Widow
+McGee, Fletcher
+McGee, Ollie
+M’Grew, Jennie
+M’Grew, Mickey
+McGuire, Jack
+McNeely, Mary
+McNeely, Paul
+McNeely, Washington
+Malloy, Father
+Marsh, Zilpha
+Marshal, The Town
+Marshall, Herbert
+Mason, Serepta
+Matheny, Faith
+Matlock, Davis
+Matlock, Lucinda
+Melveny, Abel
+Merritt, Mrs.
+Merritt, Tom
+Metcalf, Willie
+Meyers, Doctor
+Meyers, Mrs.
+Micure, Hamlet
+Miles, J. Milton
+Miller, Julia
+Miner, Georgine Sand
+Moir, Alfred
+
+N
+
+Newcomer, Professor
+Night-Watch, Andy The
+Nutter, Isa
+
+O
+
+Osborne, Mabel
+Otis, John Hancock
+
+P
+
+Pantier, Benjamin
+Pantier, Mrs. Benjamin
+Pantier, Reuben
+Peet, Rev. Abner
+Pennington, Willie
+Penniwit, the Artist
+Petit, the Poet
+Phipps, Henry
+Poague, Peleg
+Pollard, Edmund
+Potter, Cooney
+Puckett, Lydia
+Purkapile, Mrs.
+Purkapile, Roscoe
+Putt, Hod
+
+R
+
+Reece, Mrs. George
+Rhodes, Ralph
+Rhodes, Thomas
+Richter, Gustav
+Robbins, Hortense
+Roberts, Rosie
+Ross, Thomas, Jr.
+Russian Sonia
+Rutledge, Anne
+
+S
+
+Sayre, Johnnie
+Scates, Hiram
+Schirding, Albert
+Schmidt, Felix
+Schrœder The Fisherman
+Scott, Julian
+Sersmith the Dentist
+Sewall, Harlan
+Sharp, Percival
+Shaw, “Ace”
+Shelley, Percy Bysshe
+Shope, Tennessee Claflin
+Sibley, Amos
+Sibley, Mrs.
+Siever, Conrad
+Simmons, Walter
+Sissman, Dillard
+Slack, Margaret Fuller
+Smith, Louise
+Soldiers, Many
+Somers, Jonathan Swift
+Somers, Judge
+Sparks, Emily
+Spears, Lois
+Spooniad, The
+Standard, W. Lloyd Garrison
+Stewart, Lillian
+Stoddard, Judson
+
+T
+
+Tanner, Robert Fulton
+Taylor, Deacon
+Theodore, The Poet
+Thornton, English
+Throckmorton, Alexander
+Todd, Eugenia
+Tompkins, Josiah
+Trainor, the Druggist
+Trevelyan, Thomas
+Trimble, George
+Tripp, Henry
+Tubbs, Hildrup
+Turner, Francis
+Tutt, Oaks
+
+U
+
+Unknown, The
+
+W
+
+Wasson, John
+Wasson, Rebecca
+Webster, Charles
+Weirauch, Adam
+Weldy, “Butch”
+Wertman, Elsa
+Whedon, Editor
+Whitney, Harmon
+Wiley, Rev. Lemuel
+Will, Arlo
+William and Emily
+Williams, Dora
+Williams, Mrs.
+Wilmans, Harry
+Witt, Zenas
+
+Y
+
+Yee Bow
+
+Z
+
+Zoll, Perry
+
+
+
+
+The Hill
+
+
+_Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
+The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the
+fighter?
+All, all are sleeping on the hill.
+
+One passed in a fever,
+One was burned in a mine,
+One was killed in a brawl,
+One died in a jail,
+One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife—
+All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
+
+Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
+The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?—
+All, all are sleeping on the hill.
+
+One died in shameful child-birth,
+One of a thwarted love,
+One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
+One of a broken pride, in the search for heart’s desire;
+One after life in far-away London and Paris
+Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag—
+All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
+
+Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
+And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
+And Major Walker who had talked
+With venerable men of the revolution?—
+All, all are sleeping on the hill.
+
+They brought them dead sons from the war,
+And daughters whom life had crushed,
+And their children fatherless, crying—
+All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
+
+Where is Old Fiddler Jones
+Who played with life all his ninety years,
+Braving the sleet with bared breast,
+Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,
+Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?
+Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,
+Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary’s Grove,
+Of what Abe Lincoln said
+One time at Springfield._
+
+
+
+
+Hod Putt
+
+
+Here I lie close to the grave
+Of Old Bill Piersol,
+Who grew rich trading with the Indians, and who
+Afterwards took the Bankrupt Law
+And emerged from it richer than ever
+Myself grown tired of toil and poverty
+And beholding how Old Bill and others grew in wealth
+Robbed a traveler one Night near Proctor’s Grove,
+Killing him unwittingly while doing so,
+For which I was tried and hanged.
+That was my way of going into bankruptcy.
+Now we who took the bankrupt law in our respective ways
+Sleep peacefully side by side.
+
+
+
+
+Ollie McGee
+
+
+Have you seen walking through the village
+A man with downcast eyes and haggard face?
+That is my husband who, by secret cruelty
+Never to be told, robbed me of my youth and my beauty;
+Till at last, wrinkled and with yellow teeth,
+And with broken pride and shameful humility,
+I sank into the grave.
+But what think you gnaws at my husband’s heart?
+The face of what I was, the face of what he made me!
+These are driving him to the place where I lie.
+In death, therefore, I am avenged.
+
+
+
+
+Fletcher McGee
+
+
+She took my strength by minutes,
+She took my life by hours,
+She drained me like a fevered moon
+That saps the spinning world.
+The days went by like shadows,
+The minutes wheeled like stars.
+She took the pity from my heart,
+And made it into smiles.
+She was a hunk of sculptor’s clay,
+My secret thoughts were fingers:
+They flew behind her pensive brow
+And lined it deep with pain.
+They set the lips, and sagged the cheeks,
+And drooped the eye with sorrow.
+My soul had entered in the clay,
+Fighting like seven devils.
+It was not mine, it was not hers;
+She held it, but its struggles
+Modeled a face she hated,
+And a face I feared to see.
+I beat the windows, shook the bolts.
+I hid me in a corner
+And then she died and haunted me,
+And hunted me for life.
+
+
+
+
+Robert Fulton Tanner
+
+
+If a man could bite the giant hand
+That catches and destroys him,
+As I was bitten by a rat
+While demonstrating my patent trap,
+In my hardware store that day.
+But a man can never avenge himself
+On the monstrous ogre Life.
+You enter the room—that’s being born;
+And then you must live—work out your soul,
+Aha! the bait that you crave is in view:
+A woman with money you want to marry,
+Prestige, place, or power in the world.
+But there’s work to do and things to conquer—
+Oh, yes! the wires that screen the bait.
+At last you get in—but you hear a step:
+The ogre, Life, comes into the room,
+(He was waiting and heard the clang of the spring)
+To watch you nibble the wondrous cheese,
+And stare with his burning eyes at you,
+And scowl and laugh, and mock and curse you,
+Running up and down in the trap,
+Until your misery bores him.
+
+
+
+
+Cassius Hueffer
+
+
+They have chiseled on my stone the words:
+“His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him
+That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
+This was a man.”
+Those who knew me smile
+As they read this empty rhetoric.
+My epitaph should have been:
+“Life was not gentle to him,
+And the elements so mixed in him
+That he made warfare on life
+In the which he was slain.”
+While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,
+Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph
+Graven by a fool!
+
+
+
+
+Serepta Mason
+
+
+My life’s blossom might have bloomed on all sides
+Save for a bitter wind which stunted my petals
+On the side of me which you in the village could see.
+From the dust I lift a voice of protest:
+My flowering side you never saw!
+Ye living ones, ye are fools indeed
+Who do not know the ways of the wind
+And the unseen forces
+That govern the processes of life.
+
+
+
+
+Amanda Barker
+
+
+Henry got me with child,
+Knowing that I could not bring forth life
+Without losing my own.
+In my youth therefore I entered the portals of dust.
+Traveler, it is believed in the village where I lived
+That Henry loved me with a husband’s love
+But I proclaim from the dust
+That he slew me to gratify his hatred.
+
+
+
+
+Constance Hately
+
+
+You praise my self-sacrifice, Spoon River,
+In rearing Irene and Mary,
+Orphans of my older sister!
+And you censure Irene and Mary
+For their contempt for me!
+But praise not my self-sacrifice.
+And censure not their contempt;
+I reared them, I cared for them, true enough!—
+But I poisoned my benefactions
+With constant reminders of their dependence.
+
+
+
+
+Chase Henry
+
+
+In life I was the town drunkard;
+When I died the priest denied me burial
+In holy ground.
+The which redounded to my good fortune.
+For the Protestants bought this lot,
+And buried my body here,
+Close to the grave of the banker Nicholas,
+And of his wife Priscilla.
+Take note, ye prudent and pious souls,
+Of the cross—currents in life
+Which bring honor to the dead, who lived in shame
+
+
+
+
+Harry Carey Goodhue
+
+
+You never marveled, dullards of Spoon River,
+When Chase Henry voted against the saloons
+To revenge himself for being shut off.
+But none of you was keen enough
+To follow my steps, or trace me home
+As Chase’s spiritual brother.
+Do you remember when I fought
+The bank and the courthouse ring,
+For pocketing the interest on public funds?
+And when I fought our leading citizens
+For making the poor the pack-horses of the taxes?
+And when I fought the water works
+For stealing streets and raising rates?
+And when I fought the business men
+Who fought me in these fights?
+Then do you remember:
+That staggering up from the wreck of defeat,
+And the wreck of a ruined career,
+I slipped from my cloak my last ideal,
+Hidden from all eyes until then,
+Like the cherished jawbone of an ass,
+And smote the bank and the water works,
+And the business men with prohibition,
+And made Spoon River pay the cost
+Of the fights that I had lost.
+
+
+
+
+Judge Somers
+
+
+How does it happen, tell me,
+That I who was most erudite of lawyers,
+Who knew Blackstone and Coke
+Almost by heart, who made the greatest speech
+The court-house ever heard, and wrote
+A brief that won the praise of Justice Breese
+How does it happen, tell me,
+That I lie here unmarked, forgotten,
+While Chase Henry, the town drunkard,
+Has a marble block, topped by an urn
+Wherein Nature, in a mood ironical,
+Has sown a flowering weed?
+
+
+
+
+Kinsey Keene
+
+
+Your attention, Thomas Rhodes, president of the bank;
+Coolbaugh Whedon, editor of the Argus;
+Rev. Peet, pastor of the leading church;
+A. D. Blood, several times Mayor of Spoon River;
+And finally all of you, members of the Social Purity Club—
+Your attention to Cambronne’s dying words,
+Standing with the heroic remnant
+Of Napoleon’s guard on Mount Saint Jean
+At the battle field of Waterloo,
+When Maitland, the Englishman, called to them:
+“Surrender, brave Frenchmen!”—
+There at close of day with the battle hopelessly lost,
+And hordes of men no longer the army
+Of the great Napoleon
+Streamed from the field like ragged strips
+Of thunder clouds in the storm.
+Well, what Cambronne said to Maitland
+Ere the English fire made smooth the brow of the hill
+Against the sinking light of day
+Say I to you, and all of you,
+And to you, O world.
+And I charge you to carve it
+Upon my stone.
+
+
+
+
+Benjamin Pantier
+
+
+Together in this grave lie Benjamin Pantier, attorney at law,
+And Nig, his dog, constant companion, solace and friend.
+Down the gray road, friends, children, men and women,
+Passing one by one out of life, left me till I was alone
+With Nig for partner, bed-fellow; comrade in drink.
+In the morning of life I knew aspiration and saw glory,
+The she, who survives me, snared my soul
+With a snare which bled me to death,
+Till I, once strong of will, lay broken, indifferent,
+Living with Nig in a room back of a dingy office.
+Under my Jaw-bone is snuggled the bony nose of Nig
+Our story is lost in silence. Go by, mad world!
+
+
+
+
+Mrs. Benjamin Pantier
+
+
+I know that he told that I snared his soul
+With a snare which bled him to death.
+And all the men loved him,
+And most of the women pitied him.
+But suppose you are really a lady, and have delicate tastes,
+And loathe the smell of whiskey and onions,
+And the rhythm of Wordsworth’s “Ode” runs in your ears,
+While he goes about from morning till night
+Repeating bits of that common thing;
+“Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?”
+And then, suppose;
+You are a woman well endowed,
+And the only man with whom the law and morality
+Permit you to have the marital relation
+Is the very man that fills you with disgust
+Every time you think of it while you think of it
+Every time you see him?
+That’s why I drove him away from home
+To live with his dog in a dingy room
+Back of his office.
+
+
+
+
+Reuben Pantier
+
+
+Well, Emily Sparks, your prayers were not wasted,
+Your love was not all in vain.
+I owe whatever I was in life
+To your hope that would not give me up,
+To your love that saw me still as good.
+Dear Emily Sparks, let me tell you the story.
+I pass the effect of my father and mother;
+The milliner’s daughter made me trouble
+And out I went in the world,
+Where I passed through every peril known
+Of wine and women and joy of life.
+One night, in a room in the Rue de Rivoli,
+I was drinking wine with a black-eyed cocotte,
+And the tears swam into my eyes.
+She though they were amorous tears and smiled
+For thought of her conquest over me.
+But my soul was three thousand miles away,
+In the days when you taught me in Spoon River.
+And just because you no more could love me,
+Nor pray for me, nor write me letters,
+The eternal silence of you spoke instead.
+And the Black-eyed cocotte took the tears for hers,
+As well as the deceiving kisses I gave her.
+Somehow, from that hour, I had a new vision
+Dear Emily Sparks!
+
+
+
+
+Emily Sparks
+
+
+Where is my boy, my boy
+In what far part of the world?
+The boy I loved best of all in the school?—
+I, the teacher, the old maid, the virgin heart,
+Who made them all my children.
+Did I know my boy aright,
+Thinking of him as a spirit aflame,
+Active, ever aspiring?
+Oh, boy, boy, for whom I prayed and prayed
+In many a watchful hour at night,
+Do you remember the letter I wrote you
+Of the beautiful love of Christ?
+And whether you ever took it or not,
+My, boy, wherever you are,
+Work for your soul’s sake,
+That all the clay of you, all of the dross of you,
+May yield to the fire of you,
+Till the fire is nothing but light!…
+Nothing but light!
+
+
+
+
+Trainor, the Druggist
+
+
+Only the chemist can tell, and not always the chemist,
+What will result from compounding
+Fluids or solids.
+And who can tell
+How men and women will interact
+On each other, or what children will result?
+There were Benjamin Pantier and his wife,
+Good in themselves, but evil toward each other;
+He oxygen, she hydrogen,
+Their son, a devastating fire.
+I Trainor, the druggist, a miser of chemicals,
+Killed while making an experiment,
+Lived unwedded.
+
+
+
+
+Daisy Fraser
+
+
+Did you ever hear of Editor Whedon
+Giving to the public treasury any of the money he received
+For supporting candidates for office?
+Or for writing up the canning factory
+To get people to invest?
+Or for suppressing the facts about the bank,
+When it was rotten and ready to break?
+Did you ever hear of the Circuit Judge
+Helping anyone except the “Q” railroad,
+Or the bankers? Or did Rev. Peet or Rev. Sibley
+Give any part of their salary, earned by keeping still,
+Or speaking out as the leaders wished them to do,
+To the building of the water works?
+But I—Daisy Fraser who always passed
+Along the street through rows of nods and smiles,
+And coughs and words such as “there she goes.”
+Never was taken before Justice Arnett
+Without contributing ten dollars and costs
+To the school fund of Spoon River!
+
+
+
+
+Benjamin Fraser
+
+
+Their spirits beat upon mine
+Like the wings of a thousand butterflies.
+I closed my eyes and felt their spirits vibrating.
+I closed my eyes, yet I knew when their lashes
+Fringed their cheeks from downcast eyes,
+And when they turned their heads;
+And when their garments clung to them,
+Or fell from them, in exquisite draperies.
+Their spirits watched my ecstasy
+With wide looks of starry unconcern.
+Their spirits looked upon my torture;
+They drank it as it were the water of life;
+With reddened cheeks, brightened eyes,
+The rising flame of my soul made their spirits gilt,
+Like the wings of a butterfly drifting suddenly into sunlight.
+And they cried to me for life, life, life.
+But in taking life for myself,
+In seizing and crushing their souls,
+As a child crushes grapes and drinks
+From its palms the purple juice,
+I came to this wingless void,
+Where neither red, nor gold, nor wine,
+Nor the rhythm of life are known.
+
+
+
+
+Minerva Jones
+
+
+I am Minerva, the village poetess,
+Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
+For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,
+And all the more when “Butch” Weldy
+Captured me after a brutal hunt.
+He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;
+And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,
+Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice.
+Will some one go to the village newspaper,
+And gather into a book the verses I wrote?—
+I thirsted so for love
+I hungered so for life!
+
+
+
+
+“Indignation” Jones
+
+
+You would not believe, would you
+That I came from good Welsh stock?
+That I was purer blooded than the white trash here?
+And of more direct lineage than the
+New Englanders And Virginians of Spoon River?
+You would not believe that I had been to school
+And read some books.
+You saw me only as a run-down man
+With matted hair and beard
+And ragged clothes.
+Sometimes a man’s life turns into a cancer
+From being bruised and continually bruised,
+And swells into a purplish mass
+Like growths on stalks of corn.
+Here was I, a carpenter, mired in a bog of life
+Into which I walked, thinking it was a meadow,
+With a slattern for a wife, and poor Minerva, my daughter,
+Whom you tormented and drove to death.
+So I crept, crept, like a snail through the days
+Of my life.
+No more you hear my footsteps in the morning,
+Resounding on the hollow sidewalk
+Going to the grocery store for a little corn meal
+And a nickel’s worth of bacon.
+
+
+
+
+“Butch” Weldy
+
+
+After I got religion and steadied down
+They gave me a job in the canning works,
+And every morning I had to fill
+The tank in the yard with gasoline,
+That fed the blow-fires in the sheds
+To heat the soldering irons.
+And I mounted a rickety ladder to do it,
+Carrying buckets full of the stuff.
+One morning, as I stood there pouring,
+The air grew still and seemed to heave,
+And I shot up as the tank exploded,
+And down I came with both legs broken,
+And my eyes burned crisp as a couple of eggs.
+For someone left a blow—fire going,
+And something sucked the flame in the tank.
+The Circuit Judge said whoever did it
+Was a fellow-servant of mine, and so
+Old Rhodes’ son didn’t have to pay me.
+And I sat on the witness stand as blind
+As Jack the Fiddler, saying over and over,
+“I didn’t know him at all.”
+
+
+
+
+Doctor Meyers
+
+
+No other man, unless it was Doc Hill,
+Did more for people in this town than I.
+And all the weak, the halt, the improvident
+And those who could not pay flocked to me.
+I was good-hearted, easy Doctor Meyers.
+I was healthy, happy, in comfortable fortune,
+Blest with a congenial mate, my children raised,
+All wedded, doing well in the world.
+And then one night, Minerva, the poetess,
+Came to me in her trouble, crying.
+I tried to help her out—she died—
+They indicted me, the newspapers disgraced me,
+My wife perished of a broken heart.
+And pneumonia finished me.
+
+
+
+
+Mrs. Meyers
+
+
+He protested all his life long
+The newspapers lied about him villainously;
+That he was not at fault for Minerva’s fall,
+But only tried to help her.
+Poor soul so sunk in sin he could not see
+That even trying to help her, as he called it,
+He had broken the law human and divine.
+Passers by, an ancient admonition to you:
+If your ways would be ways of pleasantness,
+And all your pathways peace,
+Love God and keep his commandments.
+
+
+
+
+Knowlt Hoheimer
+
+
+I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.
+When I felt the bullet enter my heart
+I wished I had staid at home and gone to jail
+For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,
+Instead of running away and joining the army.
+Rather a thousand times the county jail
+Than to lie under this marble figure with wings,
+And this granite pedestal Bearing the words, “Pro Patria.”
+What do they mean, anyway?
+
+
+
+
+Lydia Puckett
+
+
+Knowlt Hoheimer ran away to the war
+The day before Curl Trenary
+Swore out a warrant through Justice Arnett
+For stealing hogs.
+But that’s not the reason he turned a soldier.
+He caught me running with Lucius Atherton.
+We quarreled and I told him never again
+To cross my path.
+Then he stole the hogs and went to the war—
+Back of every soldier is a woman.
+
+
+
+
+Frank Drummer
+
+
+Out of a cell into this darkened space—
+The end at twenty-five!
+My tongue could not speak what stirred within me,
+And the village thought me a fool.
+Yet at the start there was a clear vision,
+A high and urgent purpose in my soul
+Which drove me on trying to memorize
+The Encyclopedia Britannica!
+
+
+
+
+Hare Drummer
+
+
+Do the boys and girls still go to Siever’s
+For cider, after school, in late September?
+Or gather hazel nuts among the thickets
+On Aaron Hatfield’s farm when the frosts begin?
+For many times with the laughing girls and boys
+Played I along the road and over the hills
+When the sun was low and the air was cool,
+Stopping to club the walnut tree
+Standing leafless against a flaming west.
+Now, the smell of the autumn smoke,
+And the dropping acorns,
+And the echoes about the vales
+Bring dreams of life.
+They hover over me.
+They question me:
+Where are those laughing comrades?
+How many are with me, how many
+In the old orchards along the way to Siever’s,
+And in the woods that overlook
+The quiet water?
+
+
+
+
+Conrad Siever
+
+
+Not in that wasted garden
+Where bodies are drawn into grass
+That feeds no flocks, and into evergreens
+That bear no fruit—
+There where along the shaded walks
+Vain sighs are heard,
+And vainer dreams are dreamed
+Of close communion with departed souls—
+But here under the apple tree
+I loved and watched and pruned
+With gnarled hands
+In the long, long years;
+Here under the roots of this northern-spy
+To move in the chemic change and circle of life,
+Into the soil and into the flesh of the tree,
+And into the living epitaphs
+Of redder apples!
+
+
+
+
+Doc Hill
+
+
+I went up and down the streets
+Here and there by day and night,
+Through all hours of the night caring for the poor who were sick.
+Do you know why?
+My wife hated me, my son went to the dogs.
+And I turned to the people and poured out my love to them.
+Sweet it was to see the crowds about the lawns on the day of my
+funeral,
+And hear them murmur their love and sorrow.
+But oh, dear God, my soul trembled, scarcely able
+To hold to the railing of the new life
+When I saw Em Stanton behind the oak tree
+At the grave,
+Hiding herself, and her grief!
+
+
+
+
+Andy The Night-Watch
+
+
+In my Spanish cloak,
+And old slouch hat,
+And overshoes of felt,
+And Tyke, my faithful dog,
+And my knotted hickory cane,
+I slipped about with a bull’s-eye lantern
+From door to door on the square,
+As the midnight stars wheeled round,
+And the bell in the steeple murmured
+From the blowing of the wind;
+And the weary steps of old Doc Hill
+Sounded like one who walks in sleep,
+And a far-off rooster crew.
+And now another is watching Spoon River
+As others watched before me.
+And here we lie, Doc Hill and I
+Where none breaks through and steals,
+And no eye needs to guard.
+
+
+
+
+Sarah Brown
+
+
+Maurice, weep not, I am not here under this pine tree.
+The balmy air of spring whispers through the sweet grass,
+The stars sparkle, the whippoorwill calls,
+But thou grievest, while my soul lies rapturous
+In the blest Nirvana of eternal light!
+Go to the good heart that is my husband
+Who broods upon what he calls our guilty love:—
+Tell him that my love for you, no less than my love for him
+Wrought out my destiny—that through the flesh
+I won spirit, and through spirit, peace.
+There is no marriage in heaven
+But there is love.
+
+
+
+
+Percy Bysshe Shelley
+
+
+My father who owned the wagon-shop
+And grew rich shoeing horses
+Sent me to the University of Montreal.
+I learned nothing and returned home,
+Roaming the fields with Bert Kessler,
+Hunting quail and snipe.
+At Thompson’s Lake the trigger of my gun
+Caught in the side of the boat
+And a great hole was shot through my heart.
+Over me a fond father erected this marble shaft,
+On which stands the figure of a woman
+Carved by an Italian artist.
+They say the ashes of my namesake
+Were scattered near the pyramid of Caius Cestius
+Somewhere near Rome.
+
+
+
+
+Flossie Cabanis
+
+
+From Bindle’s opera house in the village
+To Broadway is a great step.
+But I tried to take it, my ambition fired
+When sixteen years of age,
+Seeing “East Lynne,” played here in the village
+By Ralph Barrett, the coming
+Romantic actor, who enthralled my soul.
+True, I trailed back home, a broken failure,
+When Ralph disappeared in New York,
+Leaving me alone in the city—
+But life broke him also.
+In all this place of silence
+There are no kindred spirits.
+How I wish Duse could stand amid the pathos
+Of these quiet fields
+And read these words.
+
+
+
+
+Julia Miller
+
+
+We quarreled that morning,
+For he was sixty—five, and I was thirty,
+And I was nervous and heavy with the child
+Whose birth I dreaded.
+I thought over the last letter written me
+By that estranged young soul
+Whose betrayal of me I had concealed
+By marrying the old man.
+Then I took morphine and sat down to read.
+Across the blackness that came over my eyes
+I see the flickering light of these words even now:
+“And Jesus said unto him, Verily
+I say unto thee, To-day thou shalt
+Be with me in paradise.”
+
+
+
+
+Johnnie Sayre
+
+
+Father, thou canst never know
+The anguish that smote my heart
+For my disobedience, the moment I felt
+The remorseless wheel of the engine
+Sink into the crying flesh of my leg.
+As they carried me to the home of widow Morris
+I could see the school-house in the valley
+To which I played truant to steal rides upon the trains.
+I prayed to live until I could ask your forgiveness—
+And then your tears, your broken words of comfort!
+From the solace of that hour I have gained infinite happiness.
+Thou wert wise to chisel for me:
+“Taken from the evil to come.”
+
+
+
+
+Charlie French
+
+
+Did you ever find out
+Which one of the O’Brien boys it was
+Who snapped the toy pistol against my hand?
+There when the flags were red and white
+In the breeze and “Bucky” Estil
+Was firing the cannon brought to Spoon River
+From Vicksburg by Captain Harris;
+And the lemonade stands were running
+And the band was playing,
+To have it all spoiled
+By a piece of a cap shot under the skin of my hand,
+And the boys all crowding about me saying:
+“You’ll die of lock-jaw, Charlie, sure.”
+Oh, dear! oh, dear!
+What chum of mine could have done it?
+
+
+
+
+Zenas Witt
+
+
+I was sixteen, and I had the most terrible dreams,
+And specks before my eyes, and nervous weakness.
+And I couldn’t remember the books I read,
+Like Frank Drummer who memorized page after page.
+And my back was weak, and I worried and worried,
+And I was embarrassed and stammered my lessons,
+And when I stood up to recite I’d forget
+Everything that I had studied.
+Well, I saw Dr. Weese’s advertisement,
+And there I read everything in print,
+Just as if he had known me;
+And about the dreams which I couldn’t help.
+So I knew I was marked for an early grave.
+And I worried until I had a cough
+And then the dreams stopped.
+And then I slept the sleep without dreams
+Here on the hill by the river.
+
+
+
+
+Theodore the Poet
+
+
+As a boy, Theodore, you sat for long hours
+On the shore of the turbid Spoon
+With deep-set eye staring at the door of the crawfish’s burrow,
+Waiting for him to appear, pushing ahead,
+First his waving antennæ, like straws of hay,
+And soon his body, colored like soap-stone,
+Gemmed with eyes of jet.
+And you wondered in a trance of thought
+What he knew, what he desired, and why he lived at all.
+But later your vision watched for men and women
+Hiding in burrows of fate amid great cities,
+Looking for the souls of them to come out,
+So that you could see
+How they lived, and for what,
+And why they kept crawling so busily
+Along the sandy way where water fails
+As the summer wanes.
+
+
+
+
+The Town Marshal
+
+
+The Prohibitionists made me Town Marshal
+When the saloons were voted out,
+Because when I was a drinking man,
+Before I joined the church, I killed a Swede
+At the saw-mill near Maple Grove.
+And they wanted a terrible man,
+Grim, righteous, strong, courageous,
+And a hater of saloons and drinkers,
+To keep law and order in the village.
+And they presented me with a loaded cane
+With which I struck Jack McGuire
+Before he drew the gun with which he killed me.
+The Prohibitionists spent their money in vain
+To hang him, for in a dream
+I appeared to one of the twelve jurymen
+And told him the whole secret story.
+Fourteen years were enough for killing me.
+
+
+
+
+Jack McGuire
+
+
+They would have lynched me
+Had I not been secretly hurried away
+To the jail at Peoria.
+And yet I was going peacefully home,
+Carrying my jug, a little drunk,
+When Logan, the marshal, halted me
+Called me a drunken hound and shook me
+And, when I cursed him for it, struck me
+With that Prohibition loaded cane—
+All this before I shot him.
+They would have hanged me except for this:
+My lawyer, Kinsey Keene, was helping to land
+Old Thomas Rhodes for wrecking the bank,
+And the judge was a friend of
+Rhodes And wanted him to escape,
+And Kinsey offered to quit on Rhodes
+For fourteen years for me.
+And the bargain was made.
+I served my time
+And learned to read and write.
+
+
+
+
+Jacob Goodpasture
+
+
+When Fort Sumter fell and the war came
+I cried out in bitterness of soul:
+“O glorious republic now no more!”
+When they buried my soldier son
+To the call of trumpets and the sound of drums
+My heart broke beneath the weight
+Of eighty years, and I cried:
+“Oh, son who died in a cause unjust!
+In the strife of Freedom slain!”
+And I crept here under the grass.
+And now from the battlements of time, behold:
+Thrice thirty million souls being bound together
+In the love of larger truth,
+Rapt in the expectation of the birth
+Of a new Beauty,
+Sprung from Brotherhood and Wisdom.
+I with eyes of spirit see the Transfiguration
+Before you see it.
+But ye infinite brood of golden eagles nesting ever higher,
+Wheeling ever higher, the sun-light wooing
+Of lofty places of Thought,
+Forgive the blindness of the departed owl.
+
+
+
+
+Dorcas Gustine
+
+
+I was not beloved of the villagers,
+But all because I spoke my mind,
+And met those who transgressed against me
+With plain remonstrance, hiding nor nurturing
+Nor secret griefs nor grudges.
+That act of the Spartan boy is greatly praised,
+Who hid the wolf under his cloak,
+Letting it devour him, uncomplainingly.
+It is braver, I think, to snatch the wolf forth
+And fight him openly, even in the street,
+Amid dust and howls of pain.
+The tongue may be an unruly member—
+But silence poisons the soul.
+Berate me who will—I am content.
+
+
+
+
+Nicholas Bindle
+
+
+Were you not ashamed, fellow citizens,
+When my estate was probated and everyone knew
+How small a fortune I left?—
+You who hounded me in life,
+To give, give, give to the churches, to the poor,
+To the village!—me who had already given much.
+And think you not I did not know
+That the pipe-organ, which I gave to the church,
+Played its christening songs when Deacon Rhodes,
+Who broke and all but ruined me,
+Worshipped for the first time after his acquittal?
+
+
+
+
+Harold Arnett
+
+
+I leaned against the mantel, sick, sick,
+Thinking of my failure, looking into the abysm,
+Weak from the noon-day heat.
+A church bell sounded mournfully far away,
+I heard the cry of a baby,
+And the coughing of John Yarnell,
+Bed-ridden, feverish, feverish, dying,
+Then the violent voice of my wife:
+“Watch out, the potatoes are burning!”
+I smelled them . . . then there was irresistible disgust.
+I pulled the trigger . . . blackness . . . light . . .
+Unspeakable regret . . . fumbling for the world again.
+Too late! Thus I came here,
+With lungs for breathing . . . one cannot breathe here with lungs,
+Though one must breathe
+Of what use is it To rid one’s self of the world,
+When no soul may ever escape the eternal destiny of life?
+
+
+
+
+Margaret Fuller Slack
+
+
+I would have been as great as George Eliot
+But for an untoward fate.
+For look at the photograph of me made by Penniwit,
+Chin resting on hand, and deep—set eyes—
+Gray, too, and far-searching.
+But there was the old, old problem:
+Should it be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity?
+Then John Slack, the rich druggist, wooed me,
+Luring me with the promise of leisure for my novel,
+And I married him, giving birth to eight children,
+And had no time to write.
+It was all over with me, anyway,
+When I ran the needle in my hand
+While washing the baby’s things,
+And died from lock—jaw, an ironical death.
+Hear me, ambitious souls,
+Sex is the curse of life.
+
+
+
+
+George Trimble
+
+
+Do you remember when I stood on the steps
+Of the Court House and talked free-silver,
+And the single-tax of Henry George?
+Then do you remember that, when the Peerless Leader
+Lost the first battle, I began to talk prohibition,
+And became active in the church?
+That was due to my wife,
+Who pictured to me my destruction
+If I did not prove my morality to the people.
+Well, she ruined me:
+For the radicals grew suspicious of me,
+And the conservatives were never sure of me—
+And here I lie, unwept of all.
+
+
+
+
+Dr. Siegfried Iseman
+
+
+I said when they handed me my diploma,
+I said to myself I will be good
+And wise and brave and helpful to others;
+I said I will carry the Christian creed
+Into the practice of medicine!
+Somehow the world and the other doctors
+Know what’s in your heart as soon as you make
+This high-souled resolution.
+And the way of it is they starve you out.
+And no one comes to you but the poor.
+And you find too late that being a doctor
+Is just a way of making a living.
+And when you are poor and have to carry
+The Christian creed and wife and children
+All on your back, it is too much!
+That’s why I made the Elixir of Youth,
+Which landed me in the jail at Peoria
+Branded a swindler and a crook
+By the upright Federal Judge!
+
+
+
+
+“Ace” Shaw
+
+
+I never saw any difference
+Between playing cards for money
+And selling real estate,
+Practicing law, banking, or anything else.
+For everything is chance.
+Nevertheless
+Seest thou a man diligent in business?
+He shall stand before Kings!
+
+
+
+
+Lois Spears
+
+
+Here lies the body of Lois Spears,
+Born Lois Fluke, daughter of Willard Fluke,
+Wife of Cyrus Spears,
+Mother of Myrtle and Virgil Spears,
+Children with clear eyes and sound limbs—
+(I was born blind)
+I was the happiest of women
+As wife, mother and housekeeper.
+Caring for my loved ones,
+And making my home
+A place of order and bounteous hospitality:
+For I went about the rooms,
+And about the garden
+With an instinct as sure as sight,
+As though there were eyes in my finger tips—
+Glory to God in the highest.
+
+
+
+
+Justice Arnett
+
+
+It is true, fellow citizens,
+That my old docket lying there for years
+On a shelf above my head and over
+The seat of justice, I say it is true
+That docket had an iron rim
+Which gashed my baldness when it fell—
+(Somehow I think it was shaken loose
+By the heave of the air all over town
+When the gasoline tank at the canning works
+Blew up and burned Butch Weldy)—
+But let us argue points in order,
+And reason the whole case carefully:
+First I concede my head was cut,
+But second the frightful thing was this:
+The leaves of the docket shot and showered
+Around me like a deck of cards
+In the hands of a sleight of hand performer.
+And up to the end I saw those leaves
+Till I said at last, “Those are not leaves,
+Why, can’t you see they are days and days
+And the days and days of seventy years?
+And why do you torture me with leaves
+And the little entries on them?
+
+
+
+
+Willard Fluke
+
+
+My wife lost her health,
+And dwindled until she weighed scarce ninety pounds.
+Then that woman, whom the men
+Styled Cleopatra, came along.
+And we—we married ones
+All broke our vows, myself among the rest.
+Years passed and one by one
+Death claimed them all in some hideous form
+And I was borne along by dreams
+Of God’s particular grace for me,
+And I began to write, write, write, reams on reams
+Of the second coming of Christ.
+Then Christ came to me and said,
+“Go into the church and stand before the congregation
+And confess your sin.”
+But just as I stood up and began to speak
+I saw my little girl, who was sitting in the front seat—
+My little girl who was born blind!
+After that, all is blackness.
+
+
+
+
+Aner Clute
+
+
+Over and over they used to ask me,
+While buying the wine or the beer,
+In Peoria first, and later in Chicago,
+Denver, Frisco, New York, wherever I lived
+How I happened to lead the life,
+And what was the start of it.
+Well, I told them a silk dress,
+And a promise of marriage from a rich man—
+(It was Lucius Atherton).
+But that was not really it at all.
+Suppose a boy steals an apple
+From the tray at the grocery store,
+And they all begin to call him a thief,
+The editor, minister, judge, and all the people—
+“A thief,” “a thief,” “a thief,” wherever he goes
+And he can’t get work, and he can’t get bread
+Without stealing it, why the boy will steal.
+It’s the way the people regard the theft of the apple
+That makes the boy what he is.
+
+
+
+
+Lucius Atherton
+
+
+When my moustache curled,
+And my hair was black,
+And I wore tight trousers
+And a diamond stud,
+I was an excellent knave of hearts and took many a trick.
+But when the gray hairs began to appear—
+Lo! a new generation of girls
+Laughed at me, not fearing me,
+And I had no more exciting adventures
+Wherein I was all but shot for a heartless devil,
+But only drabby affairs, warmed-over affairs
+Of other days and other men.
+And time went on until I lived at
+Mayer’s restaurant,
+Partaking of short-orders, a gray, untidy,
+Toothless, discarded, rural Don Juan. . . .
+There is a mighty shade here who sings
+Of one named Beatrice;
+And I see now that the force that made him great
+Drove me to the dregs of life.
+
+
+
+
+Homer Clapp
+
+
+Often Aner Clute at the gate
+Refused me the parting kiss,
+Saying we should be engaged before that;
+And just with a distant clasp of the hand
+She bade me good-night, as I brought her home
+From the skating rink or the revival.
+No sooner did my departing footsteps die away
+Than Lucius Atherton,
+(So I learned when Aner went to Peoria)
+Stole in at her window, or took her riding
+Behind his spanking team of bays
+Into the country.
+The shock of it made me settle down
+And I put all the money I got from my father’s estate
+Into the canning factory, to get the job
+Of head accountant, and lost it all.
+And then I knew I was one of Life’s fools,
+Whom only death would treat as the equal
+Of other men, making me feel like a man.
+
+
+
+
+Deacon Taylor
+
+
+I belonged to the church,
+And to the party of prohibition;
+And the villagers thought I died of eating watermelon.
+In truth I had cirrhosis of the liver,
+For every noon for thirty years,
+I slipped behind the prescription partition
+In Trainor’s drug store
+And poured a generous drink
+From the bottle marked “Spiritus frumenti.”
+
+
+
+
+Sam Hookey
+
+
+I ran away from home with the circus,
+Having fallen in love with Mademoiselle Estralada,
+The lion tamer.
+One time, having starved the lions
+For more than a day,
+I entered the cage and began to beat Brutus
+And Leo and Gypsy.
+Whereupon Brutus sprang upon me,
+And killed me.
+On entering these regions
+I met a shadow who cursed me,
+And said it served me right. . . .
+It was Robespierre!
+
+
+
+
+Cooney Potter
+
+
+I inherited forty acres from my Father
+And, by working my wife, my two sons and two daughters
+From dawn to dusk, I acquired
+A thousand acres.
+But not content,
+Wishing to own two thousand acres,
+I bustled through the years with axe and plow,
+Toiling, denying myself, my wife, my sons, my daughters.
+Squire Higbee wrongs me to say
+That I died from smoking Red Eagle cigars.
+Eating hot pie and gulping coffee
+During the scorching hours of harvest time
+Brought me here ere I had reached my sixtieth year.
+
+
+
+
+Fiddler Jones
+
+
+The earth keeps some vibration going
+There in your heart, and that is you.
+And if the people find you can fiddle,
+Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
+What do you see, a harvest of clover?
+Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
+The wind’s in the corn; you rub your hands
+For beeves hereafter ready for market;
+Or else you hear the rustle of skirts
+Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.
+To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust
+Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;
+They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
+Stepping it off, to “Toor-a-Loor.”
+How could I till my forty acres
+Not to speak of getting more,
+With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
+Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
+And the creak of a wind-mill—only these?
+And I never started to plow in my life
+That some one did not stop in the road
+And take me away to a dance or picnic.
+I ended up with forty acres;
+I ended up with a broken fiddle—
+And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
+And not a single regret.
+
+
+
+
+Nellie Clark
+
+
+I was only eight years old;
+And before I grew up and knew what it meant
+I had no words for it, except
+That I was frightened and told my
+Mother; And that my Father got a pistol
+And would have killed Charlie, who was a big boy,
+Fifteen years old, except for his Mother.
+Nevertheless the story clung to me.
+But the man who married me, a widower of thirty-five,
+Was a newcomer and never heard it
+’Till two years after we were married.
+Then he considered himself cheated,
+And the village agreed that I was not really a virgin.
+Well, he deserted me, and I died
+The following winter.
+
+
+
+
+Louise Smith
+
+
+Herbert broke our engagement of eight years
+When Annabelle returned to the village From the
+Seminary, ah me!
+If I had let my love for him alone
+It might have grown into a beautiful sorrow—
+Who knows?—filling my life with healing fragrance.
+But I tortured it, I poisoned it
+I blinded its eyes, and it became hatred—
+Deadly ivy instead of clematis.
+And my soul fell from its support
+Its tendrils tangled in decay.
+Do not let the will play gardener to your soul
+Unless you are sure
+It is wiser than your soul’s nature.
+
+
+
+
+Herbert Marshall
+
+
+All your sorrow, Louise, and hatred of me
+Sprang from your delusion that it was wantonness
+Of spirit and contempt of your soul’s rights
+Which made me turn to Annabelle and forsake you.
+You really grew to hate me for love of me,
+Because I was your soul’s happiness,
+Formed and tempered
+To solve your life for you, and would not.
+But you were my misery.
+If you had been
+My happiness would I not have clung to you?
+This is life’s sorrow:
+That one can be happy only where two are;
+And that our hearts are drawn to stars
+Which want us not.
+
+
+
+
+George Gray
+
+
+I have studied many times
+The marble which was chiseled for me—
+A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor.
+In truth it pictures not my destination
+But my life.
+For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;
+Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
+Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.
+Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.
+And now I know that we must lift the sail
+And catch the winds of destiny
+Wherever they drive the boat.
+To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness,
+But life without meaning is the torture
+Of restlessness and vague desire—
+It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.
+
+
+
+
+Hon. Henry Bennett
+
+
+It never came into my mind
+Until I was ready to die
+That Jenny had loved me to death, with malice of heart.
+For I was seventy, she was thirty—five,
+And I wore myself to a shadow trying to husband
+Jenny, rosy Jenny full of the ardor of life.
+For all my wisdom and grace of mind
+Gave her no delight at all, in very truth,
+But ever and anon she spoke of the giant strength
+Of Willard Shafer, and of his wonderful feat
+Of lifting a traction engine out of the ditch
+One time at Georgie Kirby’s.
+So Jenny inherited my fortune and married Willard—
+That mount of brawn! That clownish soul!
+
+
+
+
+Griffy the Cooper
+
+
+The cooper should know about tubs.
+But I learned about life as well,
+And you who loiter around these graves
+Think you know life.
+You think your eye sweeps about a wide horizon, perhaps,
+In truth you are only looking around the interior of your tub.
+You cannot lift yourself to its rim
+And see the outer world of things,
+And at the same time see yourself.
+You are submerged in the tub of yourself—
+Taboos and rules and appearances,
+Are the staves of your tub.
+Break them and dispel the witchcraft
+Of thinking your tub is life
+And that you know life.
+
+
+
+
+Sersmith the Dentist
+
+
+Do you think that odes and sermons,
+And the ringing of church bells,
+And the blood of old men and young men,
+Martyred for the truth they saw
+With eyes made bright by faith in God,
+Accomplished the world’s great reformations?
+Do you think that the Battle Hymn of the Republic
+Would have been heard if the chattel slave
+Had crowned the dominant dollar,
+In spite of Whitney’s cotton gin,
+And steam and rolling mills and iron
+And telegraphs and white free labor?
+Do you think that Daisy Fraser
+Had been put out and driven out
+If the canning works had never needed
+Her little house and lot?
+Or do you think the poker room
+Of Johnnie Taylor, and Burchard’s bar
+Had been closed up if the money lost
+And spent for beer had not been turned,
+By closing them, to Thomas Rhodes
+For larger sales of shoes and blankets,
+And children’s cloaks and gold-oak cradles?
+Why, a moral truth is a hollow tooth
+Which must be propped with gold.
+
+
+
+
+A. D. Blood
+
+
+If you in the village think that my work was a good one,
+Who closed the saloons and stopped all playing at cards,
+And haled old Daisy Fraser before Justice Arnett,
+In many a crusade to purge the people of sin;
+Why do you let the milliner’s daughter Dora,
+And the worthless son of Benjamin Pantier
+Nightly make my grave their unholy pillow?
+
+
+
+
+Robert Southey Burke
+
+
+I spent my money trying to elect you Mayor
+A. D. Blood.
+I lavished my admiration upon you,
+You were to my mind the almost perfect man.
+You devoured my personality,
+And the idealism of my youth,
+And the strength of a high-souled fealty.
+And all my hopes for the world,
+And all my beliefs in Truth,
+Were smelted up in the blinding heat
+Of my devotion to you,
+And molded into your image.
+And then when I found what you were:
+That your soul was small
+And your words were false
+As your blue-white porcelain teeth,
+And your cuffs of celluloid,
+I hated the love I had for you,
+I hated myself, I hated you
+For my wasted soul, and wasted youth.
+And I say to all, beware of ideals,
+Beware of giving your love away
+To any man alive.
+
+
+
+
+Dora Williams
+
+
+When Reuben Pantier ran away and threw me
+I went to Springfield. There I met a lush,
+Whose father just deceased left him a fortune.
+He married me when drunk.
+My life was wretched.
+A year passed and one day they found him dead.
+That made me rich. I moved on to Chicago.
+After a time met Tyler Rountree, villain.
+I moved on to New York. A gray-haired magnate
+Went mad about me—so another fortune.
+He died one night right in my arms, you know.
+(I saw his purple face for years thereafter. )
+There was almost a scandal.
+I moved on, This time to Paris. I was now a woman,
+Insidious, subtle, versed in the world and rich.
+My sweet apartment near the Champs Elysees
+Became a center for all sorts of people,
+Musicians, poets, dandies, artists, nobles,
+Where we spoke French and German, Italian, English.
+I wed Count Navigato, native of Genoa.
+We went to Rome. He poisoned me, I think.
+Now in the Campo Santo overlooking
+The sea where young Columbus dreamed new worlds,
+See what they chiseled: “Contessa Navigato
+Implora eterna quiete.”
+
+
+
+
+Mrs. Williams
+
+
+I was the milliner
+Talked about, lied about,
+Mother of Dora,
+Whose strange disappearance
+Was charged to her rearing.
+My eye quick to beauty
+Saw much beside ribbons
+And buckles and feathers
+And leghorns and felts,
+To set off sweet faces,
+And dark hair and gold.
+One thing I will tell you
+And one I will ask:
+The stealers of husbands
+Wear powder and trinkets,
+And fashionable hats.
+Wives, wear them yourselves.
+Hats may make divorces—
+They also prevent them.
+Well now, let me ask you:
+If all of the children, born here in Spoon River
+Had been reared by the
+County, somewhere on a farm;
+And the fathers and mothers had been given their freedom
+To live and enjoy, change mates if they wished,
+Do you think that Spoon River
+Had been any the worse?
+
+
+
+
+William and Emily
+
+
+There is something about Death
+Like love itself!
+If with some one with whom you have known passion
+And the glow of youthful love,
+You also, after years of life
+Together, feel the sinking of the fire
+And thus fade away together,
+Gradually, faintly, delicately,
+As it were in each other’s arms,
+Passing from the familiar room—
+That is a power of unison between souls
+Like love itself!
+
+
+
+
+The Circuit Judge
+
+
+Take note, passers-by, of the sharp erosions
+Eaten in my head-stone by the wind and rain—
+Almost as if an intangible Nemesis or hatred
+Were marking scores against me,
+But to destroy, and not preserve, my memory.
+I in life was the Circuit Judge, a maker of notches,
+Deciding cases on the points the lawyers scored,
+Not on the right of the matter.
+O wind and rain, leave my head-stone alone
+For worse than the anger of the wronged,
+The curses of the poor,
+Was to lie speechless, yet with vision clear,
+Seeing that even Hod Putt, the murderer,
+Hanged by my sentence,
+Was innocent in soul compared with me.
+
+
+
+
+Blind Jack
+
+
+I had fiddled all day at the county fair.
+But driving home “Butch” Weldy and Jack McGuire,
+Who were roaring full, made me fiddle and fiddle
+To the song of _Susie Skinner_, while whipping the horses
+Till they ran away. Blind as I was, I tried to get out
+As the carriage fell in the ditch,
+And was caught in the wheels and killed.
+There’s a blind man here with a brow
+As big and white as a cloud.
+And all we fiddlers, from highest to lowest,
+Writers of music and tellers of stories
+Sit at his feet,
+And hear him sing of the fall of Troy.
+
+
+
+
+John Horace Burleson
+
+
+I won the prize essay at school
+Here in the village,
+And published a novel before I was twenty-five.
+I went to the city for themes and to enrich my art;
+There married the banker’s daughter,
+And later became president of the bank—
+Always looking forward to some leisure
+To write an epic novel of the war.
+Meanwhile friend of the great, and lover of letters,
+And host to Matthew Arnold and to Emerson.
+An after dinner speaker, writing essays
+For local clubs. At last brought here—
+My boyhood home, you know—
+Not even a little tablet in Chicago
+To keep my name alive.
+How great it is to write the single line:
+“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll!“
+
+
+
+
+Nancy Knapp
+
+
+Well, don’t you see this was the way of it:
+We bought the farm with what he inherited,
+And his brothers and sisters accused him of poisoning
+His father’s mind against the rest of them.
+And we never had any peace with our treasure.
+The murrain took the cattle, and the crops failed.
+And lightning struck the granary.
+So we mortgaged the farm to keep going.
+And he grew silent and was worried all the time.
+Then some of the neighbors refused to speak to us,
+And took sides with his brothers and sisters.
+And I had no place to turn, as one may say to himself,
+At an earlier time in life;
+“No matter, So and so is my friend, or I can shake this off
+With a little trip to Decatur.”
+Then the dreadfulest smells infested the rooms.
+So I set fire to the beds and the old witch-house
+Went up in a roar of flame,
+As I danced in the yard with waving arms,
+While he wept like a freezing steer.
+
+
+
+
+Barry Holden
+
+
+The very fall my sister Nancy Knapp
+Set fire to the house
+They were trying Dr. Duval
+For the murder of Zora Clemens,
+And I sat in the court two weeks
+Listening to every witness.
+It was clear he had got her in a family way;
+And to let the child be born
+Would not do.
+Well, how about me with eight children,
+And one coming, and the farm
+Mortgaged to Thomas Rhodes?
+And when I got home that night,
+(After listening to the story of the buggy ride,
+And the finding of Zora in the ditch,)
+The first thing I saw, right there by the steps,
+Where the boys had hacked for angle worms,
+Was the hatchet!
+And just as I entered there was my wife,
+Standing before me, big with child.
+She started the talk of the mortgaged farm,
+And I killed her.
+
+
+
+
+State’s Attorney Fallas
+
+
+I, the scourge-wielder, balance-wrecker,
+Smiter with whips and swords;
+I, hater of the breakers of the law;
+I, legalist, inexorable and bitter,
+Driving the jury to hang the madman, Barry Holden,
+Was made as one dead by light too bright for eyes,
+And woke to face a Truth with bloody brow:
+Steel forceps fumbled by a doctor’s hand
+Against my boy’s head as he entered life
+Made him an idiot. I turned to books of science
+To care for him.
+That’s how the world of those whose minds are sick
+Became my work in life, and all my world.
+Poor ruined boy! You were, at last, the potter
+And I and all my deeds of charity
+The vessels of your hand.
+
+
+
+
+Wendell P. Bloyd
+
+
+They first charged me with disorderly conduct,
+There being no statute on blasphemy.
+Later they locked me up as insane
+Where I was beaten to death by a Catholic guard.
+My offense was this:
+I said God lied to Adam, and destined him
+To lead the life of a fool,
+Ignorant that there is evil in the world as well as good.
+And when Adam outwitted God by eating the apple
+And saw through the lie,
+God drove him out of Eden to keep him from taking
+The fruit of immortal life.
+For Christ’s sake, you sensible people,
+Here’s what God Himself says about it in the book of Genesis:
+“And the Lord God said, behold the man
+Is become as one of us” (a little envy, you see),
+“To know good and evil” (The all-is-good lie exposed):
+“And now lest he put forth his hand and take
+Also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever:
+Therefore the Lord God sent Him forth from the garden of Eden.” (The
+reason I believe God crucified His Own Son
+To get out of the wretched tangle is, because it sounds just like Him.
+)
+
+
+
+
+Francis Turner
+
+
+I could not run or play
+In boyhood.
+In manhood I could only sip the cup,
+Not drink—For scarlet-fever left my heart diseased.
+Yet I lie here
+Soothed by a secret none but Mary knows:
+There is a garden of acacia,
+Catalpa trees, and arbors sweet with vines—
+There on that afternoon in June
+By Mary’s side—
+Kissing her with my soul upon my lips
+It suddenly took flight.
+
+
+
+
+Franklin Jones
+
+
+If I could have lived another year
+I could have finished my flying machine,
+And become rich and famous.
+Hence it is fitting the workman
+Who tried to chisel a dove for me
+Made it look more like a chicken.
+For what is it all but being hatched,
+And running about the yard,
+To the day of the block?
+Save that a man has an angel’s brain,
+And sees the ax from the first!
+
+
+
+
+John M. Church
+
+
+I was attorney for the “Q”
+And the Indemnity Company which insured
+The owners of the mine.
+I pulled the wires with judge and jury,
+And the upper courts, to beat the claims
+Of the crippled, the widow and orphan,
+And made a fortune thereat.
+The bar association sang my praises
+In a high-flown resolution.
+And the floral tributes were many—
+But the rats devoured my heart
+And a snake made a nest in my skull
+
+
+
+
+Russian Sonia
+
+
+I, born in Weimar
+Of a mother who was French
+And German father, a most learned professor,
+Orphaned at fourteen years,
+Became a dancer, known as Russian Sonia,
+All up and down the boulevards of Paris,
+Mistress betimes of sundry dukes and counts,
+And later of poor artists and of poets.
+At forty years, _passée_, I sought New York
+And met old Patrick Hummer on the boat,
+Red-faced and hale, though turned his sixtieth year,
+Returning after having sold a ship-load
+Of cattle in the German city, Hamburg.
+He brought me to Spoon River and we lived here
+For twenty years—they thought that we were married
+This oak tree near me is the favorite haunt
+Of blue jays chattering, chattering all the day.
+And why not? for my very dust is laughing
+For thinking of the humorous thing called life.
+
+
+
+
+Isa Nutter
+
+
+Doc Meyers said I had satyriasis,
+And Doc Hill called it leucæmia—
+But I know what brought me here:
+I was sixty-four but strong as a man
+Of thirty-five or forty.
+And it wasn’t writing a letter a day,
+And it wasn’t late hours seven nights a week,
+And it wasn’t the strain of thinking of Minnie,
+And it wasn’t fear or a jealous dread,
+Or the endless task of trying to fathom
+Her wonderful mind, or sympathy
+For the wretched life she led
+With her first and second husband—
+It was none of these that laid me low—
+But the clamor of daughters and threats of sons,
+And the sneers and curses of all my kin
+Right up to the day I sneaked to Peoria
+And married Minnie in spite of them—
+And why do you wonder my will was made
+For the best and purest of women?
+
+
+
+
+Barney Hainsfeather
+
+
+If the excursion train to Peoria
+Had just been wrecked, I might have escaped with my life—
+Certainly I should have escaped this place.
+But as it was burned as well, they mistook me
+For John Allen who was sent to the Hebrew Cemetery
+At Chicago,
+And John for me, so I lie here.
+It was bad enough to run a clothing store in this town,
+But to be buried here—_ach!_
+
+
+
+
+Petit, the Poet
+
+
+Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
+Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel—
+Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens—
+But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.
+Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
+Ballades by the score with the same old thought:
+The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;
+And what is love but a rose that fades?
+Life all around me here in the village:
+Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth,
+Courage, constancy, heroism, failure—
+All in the loom, and oh what patterns!
+Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers—
+Blind to all of it all my life long.
+Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
+Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, what little
+iambics,
+While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?
+
+
+
+
+Pauline Barrett
+
+
+Almost the shell of a woman after the surgeon’s knife
+And almost a year to creep back into strength,
+Till the dawn of our wedding decennial
+Found me my seeming self again.
+We walked the forest together,
+By a path of soundless moss and turf.
+But I could not look in your eyes,
+And you could not look in my eyes,
+For such sorrow was ours—the beginning of gray in your hair.
+And I but a shell of myself.
+And what did we talk of?—sky and water,
+Anything, ’most, to hide our thoughts.
+And then your gift of wild roses,
+Set on the table to grace our dinner.
+Poor heart, how bravely you struggled
+To imagine and live a remembered rapture!
+Then my spirit drooped as the night came on,
+And you left me alone in my room for a while,
+As you did when I was a bride, poor heart.
+And I looked in the mirror and something said:
+“One should be all dead when one is half-dead—”
+Nor ever mock life, nor ever cheat love.”
+And I did it looking there in the mirror—
+Dear, have you ever understood?
+
+
+
+
+Mrs. Charles Bliss
+
+
+Reverend Wiley advised me not to divorce him
+For the sake of the children,
+And Judge Somers advised him the same.
+So we stuck to the end of the path.
+But two of the children thought he was right,
+And two of the children thought I was right.
+And the two who sided with him blamed me,
+And the two who sided with me blamed him,
+And they grieved for the one they sided with.
+And all were torn with the guilt of judging,
+And tortured in soul because they could not admire
+Equally him and me.
+Now every gardener knows that plants grown in cellars
+Or under stones are twisted and yellow and weak.
+And no mother would let her baby suck
+Diseased milk from her breast.
+Yet preachers and judges advise the raising of souls
+Where there is no sunlight, but only twilight,
+No warmth, but only dampness and cold—
+Preachers and judges!
+
+
+
+
+Mrs. George Reece
+
+
+To this generation I would say:
+Memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty.
+It may serve a turn in your life.
+My husband had nothing to do
+With the fall of the bank—he was only cashier.
+The wreck was due to the president, Thomas Rhodes,
+And his vain, unscrupulous son.
+Yet my husband was sent to prison,
+And I was left with the children,
+To feed and clothe and school them.
+And I did it, and sent them forth
+Into the world all clean and strong,
+And all through the wisdom of Pope, the poet:
+“Act well your part, there all the honor lies.”
+
+
+
+
+Rev. Lemuel Wiley
+
+
+I preached four thousand sermons,
+I conducted forty revivals,
+And baptized many converts.
+Yet no deed of mine
+Shines brighter in the memory of the world,
+And none is treasured more by me:
+Look how I saved the Blisses from divorce,
+And kept the children free from that disgrace,
+To grow up into moral men and women,
+Happy themselves, a credit to the village.
+
+
+
+
+Thomas Ross, Jr.
+
+
+This I saw with my own eyes: A cliff—swallow
+Made her nest in a hole of the high clay-bank
+There near Miller’s Ford.
+But no sooner were the young hatched
+Than a snake crawled up to the nest
+To devour the brood.
+Then the mother swallow with swift flutterings
+And shrill cries
+Fought at the snake,
+Blinding him with the beat of her wings,
+Until he, wriggling and rearing his head,
+Fell backward down the bank
+Into Spoon River and was drowned.
+Scarcely an hour passed
+Until a shrike
+Impaled the mother swallow on a thorn.
+As for myself I overcame my lower nature
+Only to be destroyed by my brother’s ambition.
+
+
+
+
+Rev. Abner Peet
+
+
+I had no objection at all
+To selling my household effects at auction
+On the village square.
+It gave my beloved flock the chance
+To get something which had belonged to me
+For a memorial.
+But that trunk which was struck off
+To Burchard, the grog-keeper!
+Did you know it contained the manuscripts
+Of a lifetime of sermons?
+And he burned them as waste paper.
+
+
+
+
+Jefferson Howard
+
+
+My valiant fight! For I call it valiant,
+With my father’s beliefs from old Virginia:
+Hating slavery, but no less war.
+I, full of spirit, audacity, courage
+Thrown into life here in Spoon River,
+With its dominant forces drawn from
+New England, Republicans, Calvinists, merchants, bankers,
+Hating me, yet fearing my arm.
+With wife and children heavy to carry—
+Yet fruits of my very zest of life.
+Stealing odd pleasures that cost me prestige,
+And reaping evils I had not sown;
+Foe of the church with its charnel dankness,
+Friend of the human touch of the tavern;
+Tangled with fates all alien to me,
+Deserted by hands I called my own.
+Then just as I felt my giant strength
+Short of breath, behold my children
+Had wound their lives in stranger gardens—
+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 of 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: “l 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 stepmother 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 naked 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 yelled “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
+
+
+The secret of the stars—gravitation.
+The secret of the earth—layers of rock.
+The secret of the soil—to receive seed.
+The secret of the seed—the germ.
+The secret of man—the sower.
+The secret of woman—the soil.
+My secret: Under a mound that you shall never find.
+
+
+
+
+Adam Weirauch
+
+
+I was crushed between Altgeld and Armour.
+I lost many friends, much time and money
+Fighting for Altgeld whom Editor Whedon
+Denounced as the candidate of gamblers and anarchists.
+Then Armour started to ship dressed meat to Spoon River,
+Forcing me to shut down my slaughter-house
+And my butcher shop went all to pieces.
+The new forces of Altgeld and Armour caught me
+At the same time. I thought it due me, to recoup the money I lost
+And to make good the friends that left me,
+For the Governor to appoint me Canal Commissioner.
+Instead he appointed Whedon of the Spoon River Argus,
+So I ran for the legislature and was elected.
+I said to hell with principle and sold my vote
+On Charles T. Yerkes’ street-car franchise.
+Of course I was one of the fellows they caught.
+Who was it, Armour, Altgeld or myself
+That ruined me?
+
+
+
+
+Ezra Bartlett
+
+
+A chaplain in the army,
+A chaplain in the prisons,
+An exhorter in Spoon River,
+Drunk with divinity, Spoon River—
+Yet bringing poor Eliza Johnson to shame,
+And myself to scorn and wretchedness.
+But why will you never see that love of women,
+And even love of wine,
+Are the stimulants by which the soul, hungering for divinity,
+Reaches the ecstatic vision
+And sees the celestial outposts?
+Only after many trials for strength,
+Only when all stimulants fail,
+Does the aspiring soul
+By its own sheer power
+Find the divine
+By resting upon itself.
+
+
+
+
+Amelia Garrick
+
+
+Yes, here I lie close to a stunted rose bush
+In a forgotten place near the fence
+Where the thickets from Siever’s woods
+Have crept over, growing sparsely.
+And you, you are a leader in New York,
+The wife of a noted millionaire,
+A name in the society columns,
+Beautiful, admired, magnified perhaps
+By the mirage of distance.
+You have succeeded, I have failed
+In the eyes of the world.
+You are alive, I am dead.
+Yet I know that I vanquished your spirit;
+And I know that lying here far from you,
+Unheard of among your great friends
+In the brilliant world where you move,
+I am really the unconquerable power over your life
+That robs it of complete triumph.
+
+
+
+
+John Hancock Otis
+
+
+As to democracy, fellow citizens,
+Are you not prepared to admit
+That I, who inherited riches and was to the manor born,
+Was second to none in Spoon River
+In my devotion to the cause of Liberty?
+While my contemporary, Anthony Findlay,
+Born in a shanty and beginning life
+As a water carrier to the section hands,
+Then becoming a section hand when he was grown,
+Afterwards foreman of the gang, until he rose
+To the superintendency of the railroad,
+Living in Chicago,
+Was a veritable slave driver,
+Grinding the faces of labor,
+And a bitter enemy of democracy.
+And I say to you, Spoon River,
+And to you, O republic,
+Beware of the man who rises to power
+From one suspender.
+
+
+
+
+Anthony Findlay
+
+
+Both for the country and for the man,
+And for a country as well as a man,
+’Tis better to be feared than loved.
+And if this country would rather part
+With the friendship of every nation
+Than surrender its wealth,
+I say of a man ’tis worse to lose
+Money than friends.
+And I rend the curtain that hides the soul
+Of an ancient aspiration:
+When the people clamor for freedom
+They really seek for power o’er the strong.
+I, Anthony Findlay, rising to greatness
+From a humble water carrier,
+Until I could say to thousands “Come,”
+And say to thousands “Go,”
+Affirm that a nation can never be good.
+Or achieve the good,
+Where the strong and the wise have not the rod
+To use on the dull and weak.
+
+
+
+
+John Cabanis
+
+
+Neither spite, fellow citizens,
+Nor forgetfulness of the shiftlessness.
+And the lawlessness and waste
+Under democracy’s rule in Spoon River
+Made me desert the party of law and order
+And lead the liberal party.
+Fellow citizens! I saw as one with second sight
+That every man of the millions of men
+Who give themselves to Freedom,
+And fail while Freedom fails,
+Enduring waste and lawlessness,
+And the rule of the weak and the blind,
+Dies in the hope of building earth,
+Like the coral insect, for the temple
+To stand on at the last.
+And I swear that Freedom will wage to the end
+The war for making every soul
+Wise and strong and as fit to rule
+As Plato’s lofty guardians
+In a world republic girdled!
+
+
+
+
+The Unknown
+
+
+Ye aspiring ones, listen to the story of the unknown
+Who lies here with no stone to mark the place.
+As a boy reckless and wanton,
+Wandering with gun in hand through the forest
+Near the mansion of Aaron Hatfield,
+I shot a hawk perched on the top
+Of a dead tree. He fell with guttural cry
+At my feet, his wing broken.
+Then I put him in a cage
+Where he lived many days cawing angrily at me
+When I offered him food.
+Daily I search the realms of Hades
+For the soul of the hawk,
+That I may offer him the friendship
+Of one whom life wounded and caged.
+
+
+
+
+Alexander Throckmorton
+
+
+In youth my wings were strong and tireless,
+But I did not know the mountains.
+In age I knew the mountains
+But my weary wings could not follow my vision—
+Genius is wisdom and youth.
+
+
+
+
+Jonathan Swift Somers (Author of the Spooniad)
+
+
+After you have enriched your soul
+To the highest point,
+With books, thought, suffering,
+The understanding of many personalities,
+The power to interpret glances, silences,
+The pauses in momentous transformations,
+The genius of divination and prophecy;
+So that you feel able at times to hold the world
+In the hollow of your hand;
+Then, if, by the crowding of so many powers
+Into the compass of your soul,
+Your soul takes fire,
+And in the conflagration of your soul
+The evil of the world is lighted up and made clear—
+Be thankful if in that hour of supreme vision
+Life does not fiddle.
+
+
+
+
+Widow McFarlane
+
+
+I was the Widow McFarlane,
+Weaver of carpets for all the village.
+And I pity you still at the loom of life,
+You who are singing to the shuttle
+And lovingly watching the work of your hands,
+If you reach the day of hate, of terrible truth.
+For the cloth of life is woven, you know,
+To a pattern hidden under the loom—
+A pattern you never see!
+And you weave high-hearted, singing, singing,
+You guard the threads of love and friendship
+For noble figures in gold and purple.
+And long after other eyes can see
+You have woven a moon-white strip of cloth,
+You laugh in your strength, for Hope overlays it
+With shapes of love and beauty.
+The loom stops short!
+The pattern’s out
+You’re alone in the room!
+You have woven a shroud
+And hate of it lays you in it.
+
+
+
+
+Carl Hamblin
+
+
+The press of the Spoon River _Clarion_ was wrecked,
+And I was tarred and feathered,
+For publishing this on the day the
+Anarchists were hanged in Chicago:
+“I saw a beautiful woman with bandaged eyes
+Standing on the steps of a marble temple.
+Great multitudes passed in front of her,
+Lifting their faces to her imploringly.
+In her left hand she held a sword.
+She was brandishing the sword,
+Sometimes striking a child, again a laborer,
+Again a slinking woman, again a lunatic.
+In her right hand she held a scale;
+Into the scale pieces of gold were tossed
+By those who dodged the strokes of the sword.
+A man in a black gown read from a manuscript:
+“She is no respecter of persons.”
+Then a youth wearing a red cap
+Leaped to her side and snatched away the bandage.
+And lo, the lashes had been eaten away
+From the oozy eye-lids;
+The eye-balls were seared with a milky mucus;
+The madness of a dying soul
+Was written on her face—
+But the multitude saw why she wore the bandage.”
+
+
+
+
+Editor Whedon
+
+
+To be able to see every side of every question;
+To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;
+To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,
+To use great feelings and passions of the human family
+For base designs, for cunning ends,
+To wear a mask like the Greek actors—
+Your eight-page paper—behind which you huddle,
+Bawling through the megaphone of big type:
+“This is I, the giant.”
+Thereby also living the life of a sneak-thief,
+Poisoned with the anonymous words
+Of your clandestine soul.
+To scratch dirt over scandal for money,
+And exhume it to the winds for revenge,
+Or to sell papers,
+Crushing reputations, or bodies, if need be,
+To win at any cost, save your own life.
+To glory in demoniac power, ditching civilization,
+As a paranoiac boy puts a log on the track
+And derails the express train.
+To be an editor, as I was.
+Then to lie here close by the river over the place
+Where the sewage flows from the village,
+And the empty cans and garbage are dumped,
+And abortions are hidden.
+
+
+
+
+Eugene Carman
+
+
+Rhodes’ slave! Selling shoes and gingham,
+Flour and bacon, overalls, clothing, all day long
+For fourteen hours a day for three hundred and thirteen days
+For more than twenty years.
+Saying “Yes’m” and “Yes, sir”, and “Thank you”
+A thousand times a day, and all for fifty dollars a month.
+Living in this stinking room in the rattle-trap “Commercial.”
+And compelled to go to Sunday School, and to listen
+To the Rev. Abner Peet one hundred and four times a year
+For more than an hour at a time,
+Because Thomas Rhodes ran the church
+As well as the store and the bank.
+So while I was tying my neck-tie that morning
+I suddenly saw myself in the glass:
+My hair all gray, my face like a sodden pie.
+So I cursed and cursed: You damned old thing
+You cowardly dog! You rotten pauper!
+You Rhodes’ slave! Till Roger Baughman
+Thought I was having a fight with some one,
+And looked through the transom just in time
+To see me fall on the floor in a heap
+From a broken vein in my head.
+
+
+
+
+Clarence Fawcett
+
+
+The sudden death of Eugene Carman
+Put me in line to be promoted to fifty dollars a month,
+And I told my wife and children that night.
+But it didn’t come, and so I thought
+Old Rhodes suspected me of stealing
+The blankets I took and sold on the side
+For money to pay a doctor’s bill for my little girl.
+Then like a bolt old Rhodes accused me,
+And promised me mercy for my family’s sake
+If I confessed, and so I confessed,
+And begged him to keep it out of the papers,
+And I asked the editors, too.
+That night at home the constable took me
+And every paper, except the Clarion,
+Wrote me up as a thief
+Because old Rhodes was an advertiser
+And wanted to make an example of me.
+Oh! well, you know how the children cried,
+And how my wife pitied and hated me,
+And how I came to lie here.
+
+
+
+
+W. Lloyd Garrison Standard
+
+
+Vegetarian, non-resistant, free-thinker, in ethics a Christian;
+Orator apt at the rhine-stone rhythm of Ingersoll.
+Carnivorous, avenger, believer and pagan.
+Continent, promiscuous, changeable, treacherous, vain,
+Proud, with the pride that makes struggle a thing for laughter;
+With heart cored out by the worm of theatric despair.
+Wearing the coat of indifference to hide the shame of defeat;
+I, child of the abolitionist idealism—
+A sort of _Brand_ in a birth of half-and-half.
+What other thing could happen when I defended
+The patriot scamps who burned the court house
+That Spoon River might have a new one
+Than plead them guilty?
+When Kinsey Keene drove through
+The card-board mask of my life with a spear of light,
+What could I do but slink away, like the beast of myself
+Which I raised from a whelp, to a corner and growl?
+The pyramid of my life was nought but a dune,
+Barren and formless, spoiled at last by the storm.
+
+
+
+
+Professor Newcomer
+
+
+Everyone laughed at Col. Prichard
+For buying an engine so powerful
+That it wrecked itself, and wrecked the grinder
+He ran it with.
+But here is a joke of cosmic size:
+The urge of nature that made a man
+Evolve from his brain a spiritual life—
+Oh miracle of the world!—
+The very same brain with which the ape and wolf
+Get food and shelter and procreate themselves.
+Nature has made man do this,
+In a world where she gives him nothing to do
+After all—(though the strength of his soul goes round
+In a futile waste of power.
+To gear itself to the mills of the gods)—
+But get food and shelter and procreate himself!
+
+
+
+
+Ralph Rhodes
+
+
+All they said was true:
+I wrecked my father’s bank with my loans
+To dabble in wheat; but this was true—
+I was buying wheat for him as well,
+Who couldn’t margin the deal in his name
+Because of his church relationship.
+And while George Reece was serving his term
+I chased the will-o-the-wisp of women
+And the mockery of wine in New York.
+It’s deathly to sicken of wine and women
+When nothing else is left in life.
+But suppose your head is gray, and bowed
+On a table covered with acrid stubs
+Of cigarettes and empty glasses,
+And a knock is heard, and you know it’s the knock
+So long drowned out by popping corks
+And the pea-cock screams of demireps—
+And you look up, and there’s your Theft,
+Who waited until your head was gray,
+And your heart skipped beats to say to you:
+The game is ended. I’ve called for you,
+Go out on Broadway and be run over,
+They’ll ship you back to Spoon River.
+
+
+
+
+Mickey M’Grew
+
+
+It was just like everything else in life:
+Something outside myself drew me down,
+My own strength never failed me.
+Why, there was the time I earned the money
+With which to go away to school,
+And my father suddenly needed help
+And I had to give him all of it.
+Just so it went till I ended up
+A man-of-all-work in Spoon River.
+Thus when I got the water-tower cleaned,
+And they hauled me up the seventy feet,
+I unhooked the rope from my waist,
+And laughingly flung my giant arms
+Over the smooth steel lips of the top of the tower—
+But they slipped from the treacherous slime,
+And down, down, down, I plunged
+Through bellowing darkness!
+
+
+
+
+Rosie Roberts
+
+
+I was sick, but more than that, I was mad
+At the crooked police, and the crooked game of life.
+So I wrote to the Chief of Police at Peoria:
+“I am here in my girlhood home in Spoon River,
+Gradually wasting away.
+But come and take me, I killed the son
+Of the merchant prince, in Madam Lou’s
+And the papers that said he killed himself
+In his home while cleaning a hunting gun—
+Lied like the devil to hush up scandal
+For the bribe of advertising.
+In my room I shot him, at Madam Lou’s,
+Because he knocked me down when I said
+That, in spite of all the money he had,
+I’d see my lover that night.”
+
+
+
+
+Oscar Hummel
+
+
+I staggered on through darkness,
+There was a hazy sky, a few stars
+Which I followed as best I could.
+It was nine o’clock, I was trying to get home.
+But somehow I was lost,
+Though really keeping the road.
+Then I reeled through a gate and into a yard,
+And called at the top of my voice:
+“Oh, Fiddler! Oh, Mr. Jones!”
+(I thought it was his house and he would show me the way home. )
+But who should step out but A. D. Blood,
+In his night shirt, waving a stick of wood,
+And roaring about the cursed saloons,
+And the criminals they made?
+“You drunken Oscar Hummel,” he said,
+As I stood there weaving to and fro,
+Taking the blows from the stick in his hand
+Till I dropped down dead at his feet.
+
+
+
+
+Josiah Tompkins
+
+
+I was well known and much beloved
+And rich, as fortunes are reckoned
+In Spoon River, where I had lived and worked.
+That was the home for me,
+Though all my children had flown afar—
+Which is the way of Nature—all but one.
+The boy, who was the baby, stayed at home,
+To be my help in my failing years
+And the solace of his mother.
+But I grew weaker, as he grew stronger,
+And he quarreled with me about the business,
+And his wife said I was a hindrance to it;
+And he won his mother to see as he did,
+Till they tore me up to be transplanted
+With them to her girlhood home in Missouri.
+And so much of my fortune was gone at last,
+Though I made the will just as he drew it,
+He profited little by it.
+
+
+
+
+Roscoe Purkapile
+
+
+She loved me.
+Oh! how she loved me I never had a chance to escape
+From the day she first saw me.
+But then after we were married I thought
+She might prove her mortality and let me out,
+Or she might divorce me. But few die, none resign.
+Then I ran away and was gone a year on a lark.
+But she never complained. She said all would be well
+That I would return. And I did return.
+I told her that while taking a row in a boat
+I had been captured near Van Buren Street
+By pirates on Lake Michigan,
+And kept in chains, so I could not write her.
+She cried and kissed me, and said it was cruel,
+Outrageous, inhuman! I then concluded our marriage
+Was a divine dispensation
+And could not be dissolved,
+Except by death.
+I was right.
+
+
+
+
+Mrs. Purkapile
+
+
+He ran away and was gone for a year.
+When he came home he told me the silly story
+Of being kidnapped by pirates on Lake Michigan
+And kept in chains so he could not write me.
+I pretended to believe it, though I knew very well
+What he was doing, and that he met
+The milliner, Mrs. Williams, now and then
+When she went to the city to buy goods, as she said.
+But a promise is a promise
+And marriage is marriage,
+And out of respect for my own character
+I refused to be drawn into a divorce
+By the scheme of a husband who had merely grown tired
+Of his marital vow and duty.
+
+
+
+
+Mrs. Kessler
+
+
+Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army,
+And he drew six dollars a month as a pension,
+And stood on the corner talking politics,
+Or sat at home reading Grant’s Memoirs;
+And I supported the family by washing,
+Learning the secrets of all the people
+From their curtains, counterpanes, shirts and skirts.
+For things that are new grow old at length,
+They’re replaced with better or none at all:
+People are prospering or falling back.
+And rents and patches widen with time;
+No thread or needle can pace decay,
+And there are stains that baffle soap,
+And there are colors that run in spite of you,
+Blamed though you are for spoiling a dress.
+Handkerchiefs, napery, have their secrets—
+The laundress, Life, knows all about it.
+And I, who went to all the funerals
+Held in Spoon River, swear I never
+Saw a dead face without thinking it looked
+Like something washed and ironed.
+
+
+
+
+Harmon Whitney
+
+
+Out of the lights and roar of cities,
+Drifting down like a spark in Spoon River,
+Burnt out with the fire of drink, and broken,
+The paramour of a woman I took in self-contempt,
+But to hide a wounded pride as well.
+To be judged and loathed by a village of little minds—
+I, gifted with tongues and wisdom,
+Sunk here to the dust of the justice court,
+A picker of rags in the rubbage of spites and wrongs,—
+I, whom fortune smiled on!
+I in a village,
+Spouting to gaping yokels pages of verse,
+Out of the lore of golden years,
+Or raising a laugh with a flash of filthy wit
+When they bought the drinks to kindle my dying mind.
+To be judged by you,
+The soul of me hidden from you,
+With its wound gangrened
+By love for a wife who made the wound,
+With her cold white bosom, treasonous, pure and hard,
+Relentless to the last, when the touch of her hand,
+At any time, might have cured me of the typhus,
+Caught in the jungle of life where many are lost.
+And only to think that my soul could not react,
+Like Byron’s did, in song, in something noble,
+But turned on itself like a tortured snake—judge me this way,
+O world.
+
+
+
+
+Bert Kessler
+
+
+I winged my bird,
+Though he flew toward the setting sun;
+But just as the shot rang out, he soared
+Up and up through the splinters of golden light,
+Till he turned right over, feathers ruffled,
+With some of the down of him floating near,
+And fell like a plummet into the grass.
+I tramped about, parting the tangles,
+Till I saw a splash of blood on a stump,
+And the quail lying close to the rotten roots.
+I reached my hand, but saw no brier,
+But something pricked and stung and numbed it.
+And then, in a second, I spied the rattler—
+The shutters wide in his yellow eyes,
+The head of him arched, sunk back in the rings of him,
+A circle of filth, the color of ashes,
+Or oak leaves bleached under layers of leaves.
+I stood like a stone as he shrank and uncoiled
+And started to crawl beneath the stump,
+When I fell limp in the grass.
+
+
+
+
+Lambert Hutchins
+
+
+I have two monuments besides this granite obelisk:
+One, the house I built on the hill,
+With its spires, bay windows, and roof of slate.
+The other, the lake-front in Chicago,
+Where the railroad keeps a switching yard,
+With whistling engines and crunching wheels
+And smoke and soot thrown over the city,
+And the crash of cars along the boulevard,—
+A blot like a hog-pen on the harbor
+Of a great metropolis, foul as a sty.
+I helped to give this heritage
+To generations yet unborn, with my vote
+In the House of Representatives,
+And the lure of the thing was to be at rest
+From the never—ending fright of need,
+And to give my daughters gentle breeding,
+And a sense of security in life.
+But, you see, though I had the mansion house
+And traveling passes and local distinction,
+I could hear the whispers, whispers, whispers,
+Wherever I went, and my daughters grew up
+With a look as if some one were about to strike them;
+And they married madly, helter-skelter,
+Just to get out and have a change.
+And what was the whole of the business worth?
+Why, it wasn’t worth a damn!
+
+
+
+
+Lillian Stewart
+
+
+I was the daughter of Lambert Hutchins,
+Born in a cottage near the grist-mill,
+Reared in the mansion there on the hill,
+With its spires, bay-windows, and roof of slate.
+How proud my mother was of the mansion
+How proud of father’s rise in the world!
+And how my father loved and watched us,
+And guarded our happiness.
+But I believe the house was a curse,
+For father’s fortune was little beside it;
+And when my husband found he had married
+A girl who was really poor,
+He taunted me with the spires,
+And called the house a fraud on the world,
+A treacherous lure to young men, raising hopes
+Of a dowry not to be had;
+And a man while selling his vote
+Should get enough from the people’s betrayal
+To wall the whole of his family in.
+He vexed my life till I went back home
+And lived like an old maid till I died,
+Keeping house for father.
+
+
+
+
+Hortense Robbins
+
+
+My name used to be in the papers daily
+As having dined somewhere,
+Or traveled somewhere,
+Or rented a house in Paris,
+Where I entertained the nobility.
+I was forever eating or traveling,
+Or taking the cure at Baden-Baden.
+Now I am here to do honor
+To Spoon River, here beside the family whence I sprang.
+No one cares now where I dined,
+Or lived, or whom I entertained,
+Or how often I took the cure at Baden-Baden.
+
+
+
+
+Batterton Dobyns
+
+
+Did my widow flit about
+From Mackinac to Los Angeles,
+Resting and bathing and sitting an hour
+Or more at the table over soup and meats
+And delicate sweets and coffee?
+I was cut down in my prime
+From overwork and anxiety.
+But I thought all along, whatever happens
+I’ve kept my insurance up,
+And there’s something in the bank,
+And a section of land in Manitoba.
+But just as I slipped I had a vision
+In a last delirium:
+I saw myself lying nailed in a box
+With a white lawn tie and a boutonnière,
+And my wife was sitting by a window
+Some place afar overlooking the sea;
+She seemed so rested, ruddy and fat,
+Although her hair was white.
+And she smiled and said to a colored waiter:
+“Another slice of roast beef, George.
+Here’s a nickel for your trouble.”
+
+
+
+
+Jacob Godbey
+
+
+How did you feel, you libertarians,
+Who spent your talents rallying noble reasons
+Around the saloon, as if Liberty
+Was not to be found anywhere except at the bar
+Or at a table, guzzling?
+How did you feel, Ben Pantier, and the rest of you,
+Who almost stoned me for a tyrant
+Garbed as a moralist,
+And as a wry-faced ascetic frowning upon Yorkshire pudding,
+Roast beef and ale and good will and rosy cheer—
+Things you never saw in a grog-shop in your life?
+How did you feel after I was dead and gone,
+And your goddess, Liberty, unmasked as a strumpet,
+Selling out the streets of Spoon River
+To the insolent giants
+Who manned the saloons from afar?
+Did it occur to you that personal liberty
+Is liberty of the mind,
+Rather than of the belly?
+
+
+
+
+Walter Simmons
+
+
+My parents thought that I would be
+As great as Edison or greater:
+For as a boy I made balloons
+And wondrous kites and toys with clocks
+And little engines with tracks to run on
+And telephones of cans and thread.
+I played the cornet and painted pictures,
+Modeled in clay and took the part
+Of the villain in the “Octoroon.”
+But then at twenty-one I married
+And had to live, and so, to live
+I learned the trade of making watches
+And kept the jewelry store on the square,
+Thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking,—
+Not of business, but of the engine
+I studied the calculus to build.
+And all Spoon River watched and waited
+To see it work, but it never worked.
+And a few kind souls believed my genius
+Was somehow hampered by the store.
+It wasn’t true.
+The truth was this:
+I did not have the brains.
+
+
+
+
+Tom Beatty
+
+
+I was a lawyer like Harmon Whitney
+Or Kinsey Keene or Garrison Standard,
+For I tried the rights of property,
+Although by lamp-light, for thirty years,
+In that poker room in the opera house.
+And I say to you that Life’s a gambler
+Head and shoulders above us all.
+No mayor alive can close the house.
+And if you lose, you can squeal as you will;
+You’ll not get back your money.
+He makes the percentage hard to conquer;
+He stacks the cards to catch your weakness
+And not to meet your strength.
+And he gives you seventy years to play:
+For if you cannot win in seventy
+You cannot win at all.
+So, if you lose, get out of the room—
+Get out of the room when your time is up.
+It’s mean to sit and fumble the cards
+And curse your losses, leaden-eyed,
+Whining to try and try.
+
+
+
+
+Roy Butler
+
+
+If the learned Supreme Court of Illinois
+Got at the secret of every case
+As well as it does a case of rape
+It would be the greatest court in the world.
+A jury, of neighbors mostly, with “Butch” Weldy
+As foreman, found me guilty in ten minutes
+And two ballots on a case like this:
+Richard Bandle and I had trouble over a fence
+And my wife and Mrs. Bandle quarreled
+As to whether Ipava was a finer town than Table Grove.
+I awoke one morning with the love of God
+Brimming over my heart, so I went to see Richard
+To settle the fence in the spirit of Jesus Christ.
+I knocked on the door, and his wife opened;
+She smiled and asked me in.
+I entered— She slammed the door and began to scream,
+“Take your hands off, you low down varlet!”
+Just then her husband entered.
+I waved my hands, choked up with words.
+He went for his gun, and I ran out.
+But neither the Supreme Court nor my wife
+Believed a word she said.
+
+
+
+
+Searcy Foote
+
+
+I wanted to go away to college
+But rich Aunt Persis wouldn’t help me.
+So I made gardens and raked the lawns
+And bought John Alden’s books with my earnings
+And toiled for the very means of life.
+I wanted to marry Delia Prickett,
+But how could I do it with what I earned?
+And there was Aunt Persis more than seventy
+Who sat in a wheel-chair half alive
+With her throat so paralyzed, when she swallowed
+The soup ran out of her mouth like a duck—
+A gourmand yet, investing her income
+In mortgages, fretting all the time
+About her notes and rents and papers.
+That day I was sawing wood for her,
+And reading Proudhon in between.
+I went in the house for a drink of water,
+And there she sat asleep in her chair,
+And Proudhon lying on the table,
+And a bottle of chloroform on the book,
+She used sometimes for an aching tooth!
+I poured the chloroform on a handkerchief
+And held it to her nose till she died.—
+Oh Delia, Delia, you and Proudhon
+Steadied my hand, and the coroner
+Said she died of heart failure.
+I married Delia and got the money—
+A joke on you, Spoon River?
+
+
+
+
+Edmund Pollard
+
+
+I would I had thrust my hands of flesh
+Into the disk-flowers bee-infested,
+Into the mirror-like core of fire
+Of the light of life, the sun of delight.
+For what are anthers worth or petals
+Or halo-rays? Mockeries, shadows
+Of the heart of the flower, the central flame
+All is yours, young passer-by;
+Enter the banquet room with the thought;
+Don’t sidle in as if you were doubtful
+Whether you’re welcome—the feast is yours!
+Nor take but a little, refusing more
+With a bashful “Thank you”, when you’re hungry.
+Is your soul alive? Then let it feed!
+Leave no balconies where you can climb;
+Nor milk-white bosoms where you can rest;
+Nor golden heads with pillows to share;
+Nor wine cups while the wine is sweet;
+Nor ecstasies of body or soul,
+You will die, no doubt, but die while living
+In depths of azure, rapt and mated,
+Kissing the queen-bee, Life!
+
+
+
+
+Thomas Trevelyan
+
+
+Reading in Ovid the sorrowful story of Itys,
+Son of the love of Tereus and Procne, slain
+For the guilty passion of Tereus for Philomela,
+The flesh of him served to Tereus by Procne,
+And the wrath of Tereus, the murderess pursuing
+Till the gods made Philomela a nightingale,
+Lute of the rising moon, and Procne a swallow
+Oh livers and artists of Hellas centuries gone,
+Sealing in little thuribles dreams and wisdom,
+Incense beyond all price, forever fragrant,
+A breath whereof makes clear the eyes of the soul
+How I inhaled its sweetness here in Spoon River!
+The thurible opening when I had lived and learned
+How all of us kill the children of love, and all of us,
+Knowing not what we do, devour their flesh;
+And all of us change to singers, although it be
+But once in our lives, or change—alas!—to swallows,
+To twitter amid cold winds and falling leaves!
+
+
+
+
+Percival Sharp
+
+
+Observe the clasped hands!
+Are they hands of farewell or greeting,
+Hands that I helped or hands that helped me?
+Would it not be well to carve a hand
+With an inverted thumb, like Elagabalus?
+And yonder is a broken chain,
+The weakest-link idea perhaps—
+But what was it?
+And lambs, some lying down,
+Others standing, as if listening to the shepherd—
+Others bearing a cross, one foot lifted up—
+Why not chisel a few shambles?
+And fallen columns!
+Carve the pedestal, please,
+Or the foundations; let us see the cause of the fall.
+And compasses and mathematical instruments,
+In irony of the under tenants, ignorance
+Of determinants and the calculus of variations.
+And anchors, for those who never sailed.
+And gates ajar—yes, so they were;
+You left them open and stray goats entered your garden.
+And an eye watching like one of the Arimaspi—
+So did you—with one eye.
+And angels blowing trumpets—you are heralded—
+It is your horn and your angel and your family’s estimate.
+It is all very well, but for myself
+I know I stirred certain vibrations in Spoon River
+Which are my true epitaph, more lasting than stone.
+
+
+
+
+Hiram Scates
+
+
+I tried to win the nomination
+For president of the County-board
+And I made speeches all over the County
+Denouncing Solomon Purple, my rival,
+As an enemy of the people,
+In league with the master-foes of man.
+Young idealists, broken warriors,
+Hobbling on one crutch of hope,
+Souls that stake their all on the truth,
+Losers of worlds at heaven’s bidding,
+Flocked about me and followed my voice
+As the savior of the County.
+But Solomon won the nomination;
+And then I faced about,
+And rallied my followers to his standard,
+And made him victor, made him King
+Of the Golden Mountain with the door
+Which closed on my heels just as I entered,
+Flattered by Solomon’s invitation,
+To be the County—board’s secretary.
+And out in the cold stood all my followers:
+Young idealists, broken warriors
+Hobbling on one crutch of hope—
+Souls that staked their all on the truth,
+Losers of worlds at heaven’s bidding,
+Watching the Devil kick the Millennium
+Over the Golden Mountain.
+
+
+
+
+Peleg Poague
+
+
+Horses and men are just alike.
+There was my stallion, Billy Lee,
+Black as a cat and trim as a deer,
+With an eye of fire, keen to start,
+And he could hit the fastest speed
+Of any racer around Spoon River.
+But just as you’d think he couldn’t lose,
+With his lead of fifty yards or more,
+He’d rear himself and throw the rider,
+And fall back over, tangled up,
+Completely gone to pieces.
+You see he was a perfect fraud:
+He couldn’t win, he couldn’t work,
+He was too light to haul or plow with,
+And no one wanted colts from him.
+And when I tried to drive him—well,
+He ran away and killed me.
+
+
+
+
+Jeduthan Hawley
+
+
+There would be a knock at the door
+And I would arise at midnight and go to the shop,
+Where belated travelers would hear me hammering
+Sepulchral boards and tacking satin.
+And often I wondered who would go with me
+To the distant land, our names the theme
+For talk, in the same week, for I’ve observed
+Two always go together.
+Chase Henry was paired with Edith Conant;
+And Jonathan Somers with Willie Metcalf;
+And Editor Hamblin with Francis Turner,
+When he prayed to live longer than Editor Whedon,
+And Thomas Rhodes with widow McFarlane;
+And Emily Sparks with Barry Holden;
+And Oscar Hummel with Davis Matlock;
+And Editor Whedon with Fiddler Jones;
+And Faith Matheny with Dorcas Gustine.
+And I, the solemnest man in town,
+Stepped off with Daisy Fraser.
+
+
+
+
+Abel Melveny
+
+
+I bought every kind of machine that’s known—
+Grinders, shellers, planters, mowers,
+Mills and rakes and ploughs and threshers—
+And all of them stood in the rain and sun,
+Getting rusted, warped and battered,
+For I had no sheds to store them in,
+And no use for most of them.
+And toward the last, when I thought it over,
+There by my window, growing clearer
+About myself, as my pulse slowed down,
+And looked at one of the mills I bought—
+Which I didn’t have the slightest need of,
+As things turned out, and I never ran—
+A fine machine, once brightly varnished,
+And eager to do its work,
+Now with its paint washed off—
+I saw myself as a good machine
+That Life had never used.
+
+
+
+
+Oaks Tutt
+
+
+My mother was for woman’s rights
+And my father was the rich miller at London Mills.
+I dreamed of the wrongs of the world and wanted to right them.
+When my father died, I set out to see peoples and countries
+In order to learn how to reform the world.
+I traveled through many lands. I saw the ruins of Rome
+And the ruins of Athens, And the ruins of Thebes.
+And I sat by moonlight amid the necropolis of Memphis.
+There I was caught up by wings of flame,
+And a voice from heaven said to me:
+“Injustice, Untruth destroyed them.
+Go forth Preach Justice! Preach Truth!”
+And I hastened back to Spoon River
+To say farewell to my mother before beginning my work.
+They all saw a strange light in my eye.
+And by and by, when I talked, they discovered
+What had come in my mind.
+Then Jonathan Swift Somers challenged me to debate
+The subject, (I taking the negative):
+“Pontius Pilate, the Greatest Philosopher of the World.”
+And he won the debate by saying at last,
+“Before you reform the world, Mr. Tutt
+Please answer the question of Pontius Pilate:
+“What is Truth?”
+
+
+
+
+Elliott Hawkins
+
+
+I looked like Abraham Lincoln.
+I was one of you, Spoon River, in all fellowship,
+But standing for the rights of property and for order.
+A regular church attendant,
+Sometimes appearing in your town meetings to warn you
+Against the evils of discontent and envy
+And to denounce those who tried to destroy the Union,
+And to point to the peril of the Knights of Labor.
+My success and my example are inevitable influences
+In your young men and in generations to come,
+In spite of attacks of newspapers like the _Clarion;_
+A regular visitor at Springfield
+When the Legislature was in session
+To prevent raids upon the railroads
+And the men building up the state.
+Trusted by them and by you, Spoon River, equally
+In spite of the whispers that I was a lobbyist.
+Moving quietly through the world, rich and courted.
+Dying at last, of course, but lying here
+Under a stone with an open book carved upon it
+And the words _“Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”_
+And now, you world-savers, who reaped nothing in life
+And in death have neither stones nor epitaphs,
+How do you like your silence from mouths stopped
+With the dust of my triumphant career?
+
+
+
+
+Voltaire Johnson
+
+
+Why did you bruise me with your rough places
+If you did not want me to tell you about them?
+And stifle me with your stupidities,
+If you did not want me to expose them?
+And nail me with the nails of cruelty,
+If you did not want me to pluck the nails forth
+And fling them in your faces?
+And starve me because I refused to obey you,
+If you did not want me to undermine your tyranny?
+I might have been as soul serene
+As William Wordsworth except for you!
+But what a coward you are, Spoon River,
+When you drove me to stand in a magic circle
+By the sword of Truth described!
+And then to whine and curse your burns,
+And curse my power who stood and laughed
+Amid ironical lightning!
+
+
+
+
+English Thornton
+
+
+Here! You sons of the men
+Who fought with Washington at Valley Forge,
+And whipped Black Hawk at Starved Rock,
+Arise! Do battle with the descendants of those
+Who bought land in the loop when it was waste sand,
+And sold blankets and guns to the army of Grant,
+And sat in legislatures in the early days,
+Taking bribes from the railroads!
+Arise! Do battle with the fops and bluffs,
+The pretenders and figurantes of the society column
+And the yokel souls whose daughters marry counts;
+And the parasites on great ideas,
+And the noisy riders of great causes,
+And the heirs of ancient thefts.
+Arise! And make the city yours,
+And the State yours—
+You who are sons of the hardy yeomanry of the forties!
+By God! If you do not destroy these vermin
+My avenging ghost will wipe out
+Your city and your state.
+
+
+
+
+Enoch Dunlap
+
+
+How many times, during the twenty years
+I was your leader, friends of Spoon River,
+Did you neglect the convention and caucus,
+And leave the burden on my hands
+Of guarding and saving the people’s cause?—
+Sometimes because you were ill;
+Or your grandmother was ill;
+Or you drank too much and fell asleep;
+Or else you said: “He is our leader,
+All will be well; he fights for us;
+We have nothing to do but follow.”
+But oh, how you cursed me when I fell,
+And cursed me, saying I had betrayed you,
+In leaving the caucus room for a moment,
+When the people’s enemies, there assembled,
+Waited and watched for a chance to destroy
+The Sacred Rights of the People.
+You common rabble! I left the caucus
+To go to the urinal.
+
+
+
+
+Ida Frickey
+
+
+Nothing in life is alien to you:
+I was a penniless girl from Summum
+Who stepped from the morning train in Spoon River.
+All the houses stood before me with closed doors
+And drawn shades—I was barred out;
+I had no place or part in any of them.
+And I walked past the old McNeely mansion,
+A castle of stone ’mid walks and gardens
+With workmen about the place on guard
+And the County and State upholding it
+For its lordly owner, full of pride.
+I was so hungry I had a vision:
+I saw a giant pair of scissors
+Dip from the sky, like the beam of a dredge,
+And cut the house in two like a curtain.
+But at the “Commercial” I saw a man
+Who winked at me as I asked for work—
+It was Wash McNeely’s son.
+He proved the link in the chain of title
+To half my ownership of the mansion,
+Through a breach of promise suit—the scissors.
+So, you see, the house, from the day I was born,
+Was only waiting for me.
+
+
+
+
+Seth Compton
+
+
+When I died, the circulating library
+Which I built up for Spoon River,
+And managed for the good of inquiring minds,
+Was sold at auction on the public square,
+As if to destroy the last vestige
+Of my memory and influence.
+For those of you who could not see the virtue
+Of knowing Volney’s “Ruins” as well as Butler’s “Analogy”
+And “Faust” as well as “Evangeline,”
+Were really the power in the village,
+And often you asked me
+“What is the use of knowing the evil in the world?”
+I am out of your way now, Spoon River,
+Choose your own good and call it good.
+For I could never make you see
+That no one knows what is good
+Who knows not what is evil;
+And no one knows what is true
+Who knows not what is false.
+
+
+
+
+Felix Schmidt
+
+
+It was only a little house of two rooms—
+Almost like a child’s play-house—
+With scarce five acres of ground around it;
+And I had so many children to feed
+And school and clothe, and a wife who was sick
+From bearing children.
+One day lawyer Whitney came along
+And proved to me that Christian Dallman,
+Who owned three thousand acres of land,
+Had bought the eighty that adjoined me
+In eighteen hundred and seventy-one
+For eleven dollars, at a sale for taxes,
+While my father lay in his mortal illness.
+So the quarrel arose and I went to law.
+But when we came to the proof,
+A survey of the land showed clear as day
+That Dallman’s tax deed covered my ground
+And my little house of two rooms.
+It served me right for stirring him up.
+I lost my case and lost my place.
+I left the court room and went to work
+As Christian Dallman’s tenant.
+
+
+
+
+Schrœder The Fisherman
+
+
+I sat on the bank above Bernadotte
+And dropped crumbs in the water,
+Just to see the minnows bump each other,
+Until the strongest got the prize.
+Or I went to my little pasture,
+Where the peaceful swine were asleep in the wallow,
+Or nosing each other lovingly,
+And emptied a basket of yellow corn,
+And watched them push and squeal and bite,
+And trample each other to get the corn.
+And I saw how Christian Dallman’s farm,
+Of more than three thousand acres,
+Swallowed the patch of Felix Schmidt,
+As a bass will swallow a minnow
+And I say if there’s anything in man—
+Spirit, or conscience, or breath of God
+That makes him different from fishes or hogs,
+I’d like to see it work!
+
+
+
+
+Richard Bone
+
+
+When I first came to Spoon River
+I did not know whether what they told me
+Was true or false.
+They would bring me the epitaph
+And stand around the shop while I worked
+And say “He was so kind,” “He was so wonderful,”
+“She was the sweetest woman,” “He was a consistent Christian.”
+And I chiseled for them whatever they wished,
+All in ignorance of the truth.
+But later, as I lived among the people here,
+I knew how near to the life
+Were the epitaphs that were ordered for them as they died.
+But still I chiseled whatever they paid me to chisel
+And made myself party to the false chronicles
+Of the stones,
+Even as the historian does who writes
+Without knowing the truth,
+Or because he is influenced to hide it.
+
+
+
+
+Silas Dement
+
+
+It was moon-light, and the earth sparkled
+With new-fallen frost.
+It was midnight and not a soul abroad.
+Out of the chimney of the court-house
+A gray-hound of smoke leapt and chased
+The northwest wind.
+I carried a ladder to the landing of the stairs
+And leaned it against the frame of the trap-door
+In the ceiling of the portico,
+And I crawled under the roof and amid the rafters
+And flung among the seasoned timbers
+A lighted handful of oil-soaked waste.
+Then I came down and slunk away.
+In a little while the fire-bell rang—
+Clang! Clang! Clang!
+And the Spoon River ladder company
+Came with a dozen buckets and began to pour water
+On the glorious bon-fire, growing hotter
+Higher and brighter, till the walls fell in
+And the limestone columns where Lincoln stood
+Crashed like trees when the woodman fells them.
+When I came back from Joliet
+There was a new court house with a dome.
+For I was punished like all who destroy
+The past for the sake of the future.
+
+
+
+
+Dillard Sissman
+
+
+The buzzards wheel slowly
+In wide circles, in a sky
+Faintly hazed as from dust from the road.
+And a wind sweeps through the pasture where I lie
+Beating the grass into long waves.
+My kite is above the wind,
+Though now and then it wobbles,
+Like a man shaking his shoulders;
+And the tail streams out momentarily,
+Then sinks to rest.
+And the buzzards wheel and wheel,
+Sweeping the zenith with wide circles
+Above my kite. And the hills sleep.
+And a farm house, white as snow,
+Peeps from green trees—far away.
+And I watch my kite,
+For the thin moon will kindle herself ere long,
+Then she will swing like a pendulum dial
+To the tail of my kite.
+A spurt of flame like a water-dragon
+Dazzles my eyes—
+I am shaken as a banner!
+
+
+
+
+Jonathan Houghton
+
+
+There is the caw of a crow,
+And the hesitant song of a thrush.
+There is the tinkle of a cowbell far away,
+And the voice of a plowman on Shipley’s hill.
+The forest beyond the orchard is still
+With midsummer stillness;
+And along the road a wagon chuckles,
+Loaded with corn, going to Atterbury.
+And an old man sits under a tree asleep,
+And an old woman crosses the road,
+Coming from the orchard with a bucket of blackberries.
+And a boy lies in the grass
+Near the feet of the old man,
+And looks up at the sailing clouds,
+And longs, and longs, and longs
+For what, he knows not:
+For manhood, for life, for the unknown world!
+Then thirty years passed,
+And the boy returned worn out by life
+And found the orchard vanished,
+And the forest gone,
+And the house made over,
+And the roadway filled with dust from automobiles—
+And himself desiring The Hill!
+
+
+
+
+E. C. Culbertson
+
+
+Is it true, Spoon River,
+That in the hall—way of the New Court House
+There is a tablet of bronze
+Containing the embossed faces
+Of Editor Whedon and Thomas Rhodes?
+And is it true that my successful labors
+In the County Board, without which
+Not one stone would have been placed on another,
+And the contributions out of my own pocket
+To build the temple, are but memories among the people,
+Gradually fading away, and soon to descend
+With them to this oblivion where I lie?
+In truth, I can so believe.
+For it is a law of the Kingdom of Heaven
+That whoso enters the vineyard at the eleventh hour
+Shall receive a full day’s pay.
+And it is a law of the Kingdom of this World
+That those who first oppose a good work
+Seize it and make it their own,
+When the corner—stone is laid,
+And memorial tablets are erected.
+
+
+
+
+Shack Dye
+
+
+The white men played all sorts of jokes on me.
+They took big fish off my hook
+And put little ones on, while I was away
+Getting a stringer, and made me believe
+I hadn’t seen aright the fish I had caught.
+When Burr Robbins circus came to town
+They got the ring master to let a tame leopard
+Into the ring, and made me believe
+I was whipping a wild beast like Samson
+When I, for an offer of fifty dollars,
+Dragged him out to his cage.
+One time I entered my blacksmith shop
+And shook as I saw some horse-shoes crawling
+Across the floor, as if alive—
+Walter Simmons had put a magnet
+Under the barrel of water.
+Yet everyone of you, you white men,
+Was fooled about fish and about leopards too,
+And you didn’t know any more than the horse-shoes did
+What moved you about Spoon River.
+
+
+
+
+Hildrup Tubbs
+
+
+I made two fights for the people.
+First I left my party, bearing the gonfalon
+Of independence, for reform, and was defeated.
+Next I used my rebel strength
+To capture the standard of my old party—
+And I captured it, but I was defeated.
+Discredited and discarded, misanthropical,
+I turned to the solace of gold
+And I used my remnant of power
+To fasten myself like a saprophyte
+Upon the putrescent carcass
+Of Thomas Rhodes, bankrupt bank,
+As assignee of the fund.
+Everyone now turned from me.
+My hair grew white,
+My purple lusts grew gray,
+Tobacco and whisky lost their savor
+And for years Death ignored me
+As he does a hog.
+
+
+
+
+Henry Tripp
+
+
+The bank broke and I lost my savings.
+I was sick of the tiresome game in Spoon River
+And I made up my mind to run away
+And leave my place in life and my family;
+But just as the midnight train pulled in,
+Quick off the steps jumped Cully Green
+And Martin Vise, and began to fight
+To settle their ancient rivalry,
+Striking each other with fists that sounded
+Like the blows of knotted clubs.
+Now it seemed to me that Cully was winning,
+When his bloody face broke into a grin
+Of sickly cowardice, leaning on Martin
+And whining out “We’re good friends, Mart,
+You know that I’m your friend.”
+But a terrible punch from Martin knocked him
+Around and around and into a heap.
+And then they arrested me as a witness,
+And I lost my train and staid in Spoon River
+To wage my battle of life to the end.
+Oh, Cully Green, you were my savior—
+You, so ashamed and drooped for years,
+Loitering listless about the streets,
+And tying rags round your festering soul,
+Who failed to fight it out.
+
+
+
+
+Granville Calhoun
+
+
+I wanted to be County Judge
+One more term, so as to round out a service
+Of thirty years.
+But my friends left me and joined my enemies,
+And they elected a new man.
+Then a spirit of revenge seized me,
+And I infected my four sons with it,
+And I brooded upon retaliation,
+Until the great physician, Nature,
+Smote me through with paralysis
+To give my soul and body a rest.
+Did my sons get power and money?
+Did they serve the people or yoke them,
+To till and harvest fields of self?
+For how could they ever forget
+My face at my bed-room window,
+Sitting helpless amid my golden cages
+Of singing canaries,
+Looking at the old court-house?
+
+
+
+
+Henry C. Calhoun
+
+
+I reached the highest place in Spoon River,
+But through what bitterness of spirit!
+The face of my father, sitting speechless,
+Child-like, watching his canaries,
+And looking at the court-house window
+Of the county judge’s room,
+And his admonitions to me to seek
+My own in life, and punish Spoon River
+To avenge the wrong the people did him,
+Filled me with furious energy
+To seek for wealth and seek for power.
+But what did he do but send me along
+The path that leads to the grove of the Furies?
+I followed the path and I tell you this:
+On the way to the grove you’ll pass the Fates,
+Shadow-eyed, bent over their weaving.
+Stop for a moment, and if you see
+The thread of revenge leap out of the shuttle
+Then quickly snatch from Atropos
+The shears and cut it, lest your sons
+And the children of them and their children
+Wear the envenomed robe.
+
+
+
+
+Alfred Moir
+
+
+Why was I not devoured by self-contempt,
+And rotted down by indifference
+And impotent revolt like Indignation Jones?
+Why, with all of my errant steps
+Did I miss the fate of Willard Fluke?
+And why, though I stood at Burchard’s bar,
+As a sort of decoy for the house to the boys
+To buy the drinks, did the curse of drink
+Fall on me like rain that runs off,
+Leaving the soul of me dry and clean?
+And why did I never kill a man
+Like Jack McGuire?
+But instead I mounted a little in life,
+And I owe it all to a book I read.
+But why did I go to Mason City,
+Where I chanced to see the book in a window,
+With its garish cover luring my eye?
+And why did my soul respond to the book,
+As I read it over and over?
+
+
+
+
+Perry Zoll
+
+
+My thanks, friends of the
+County Scientific Association,
+For this modest boulder,
+And its little tablet of bronze.
+Twice I tried to join your honored body,
+And was rejected
+And when my little brochure
+On the intelligence of plants
+Began to attract attention
+You almost voted me in.
+After that I grew beyond the need of you
+And your recognition.
+Yet I do not reject your memorial stone
+Seeing that I should, in so doing,
+Deprive you of honor to yourselves.
+
+
+
+
+Dippold the Optician
+
+
+What do you see now?
+Globes of red, yellow, purple.
+Just a moment! And now?
+My father and mother and sisters.
+Yes! And now?
+Knights at arms, beautiful women, kind faces.
+Try this.
+A field of grain—a city.
+Very good! And now?
+A young woman with angels bending over her.
+A heavier lens! And now?
+Many women with bright eyes and open lips.
+Try this.
+Just a goblet on a table.
+Oh I see! Try this lens!
+Just an open space—I see nothing in particular.
+Well, now!
+Pine trees, a lake, a summer sky.
+That’s better. And now?
+A book.
+Read a page for me.
+I can’t. My eyes are carried beyond the page.
+Try this lens.
+Depths of air.
+Excellent! And now!
+Light, just light making everything below it a toy world.
+Very well, we’ll make the glasses accordingly.
+
+
+
+
+Magrady Graham
+
+
+Tell me, was Altgeld elected Governor?
+For when the returns began to come in
+And Cleveland was sweeping the East
+It was too much for you, poor old heart,
+Who had striven for democracy
+In the long, long years of defeat.
+And like a watch that is worn
+I felt you growing slower until you stopped.
+Tell me, was Altgeld elected,
+And what did he do?
+Did they bring his head on a platter to a dancer,
+Or did he triumph for the people?
+For when I saw him
+And took his hand,
+The child-like blueness of his eyes
+Moved me to tears,
+And there was an air of eternity about him,
+Like the cold, clear light that rests at dawn
+On the hills!
+
+
+
+
+Archibald Higbie
+
+
+I loathed you, Spoon River.
+I tried to rise above you,
+I was ashamed of you.
+I despised you
+As the place of my nativity.
+And there in Rome, among the artists,
+Speaking Italian, speaking French,
+I seemed to myself at times to be free
+Of every trace of my origin.
+I seemed to be reaching the heights of art
+And to breathe the air that the masters breathed
+And to see the world with their eyes.
+But still they’d pass my work and say:
+“What are you driving at, my friend?
+Sometimes the face looks like Apollo’s
+At others it has a trace of Lincoln’s.”
+There was no culture, you know, in Spoon River
+And I burned with shame and held my peace.
+And what could I do, all covered over
+And weighted down with western soil
+Except aspire, and pray for another
+Birth in the world, with all of Spoon River
+Rooted out of my soul?
+
+
+
+
+Tom Merritt
+
+
+At first I suspected something—
+She acted so calm and absent-minded.
+And one day I heard the back door shut
+As I entered the front, and I saw him slink
+Back of the smokehouse into the lot
+And run across the field.
+And I meant to kill him on sight.
+But that day, walking near Fourth Bridge
+Without a stick or a stone at hand,
+All of a sudden I saw him standing
+Scared to death, holding his rabbits,
+And all I could say was, “Don’t, Don’t, Don’t,”
+As he aimed and fired at my heart.
+
+
+
+
+Mrs. Merritt
+
+
+Silent before the jury
+Returning no word to the judge when he asked me
+If I had aught to say against the sentence,
+Only shaking my head.
+What could I say to people who thought
+That a woman of thirty-five was at fault
+When her lover of nineteen killed her husband?
+Even though she had said to him over and over,
+“Go away, Elmer, go far away,
+I have maddened your brain with the gift of my body:
+You will do some terrible thing.”
+And just as I feared, he killed my husband;
+With which I had nothing to do, before
+God Silent for thirty years in prison
+And the iron gates of Joliet
+Swung as the gray and silent trusties
+Carried me out in a coffin.
+
+
+
+
+Elmer Karr
+
+
+What but the love of God could have softened
+And made forgiving the people of Spoon River
+Toward me who wronged the bed of Thomas Merritt
+And murdered him beside?
+Oh, loving hearts that took me in again
+When I returned from fourteen years in prison!
+Oh, helping hands that in the church received me
+And heard with tears my penitent confession,
+Who took the sacrament of bread and wine!
+Repent, ye living ones, and rest with Jesus.
+
+
+
+
+Elizabeth Childers
+
+
+Dust of my dust,
+And dust with my dust,
+O, child who died as you entered the world,
+Dead with my death!
+Not knowing
+Breath, though you tried so hard,
+With a heart that beat when you lived with me,
+And stopped when you left me for Life.
+It is well, my child.
+For you never traveled
+The long, long way that begins with school days,
+When little fingers blur under the tears
+That fall on the crooked letters.
+And the earliest wound, when a little mate
+Leaves you alone for another;
+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 makes 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 guns
+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 hooked 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 trial—
+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 midges 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
+Who showed me a letter of John Muir.
+
+
+
+
+Samuel Gardner
+
+
+I who kept the greenhouse,
+Lover of trees and flowers,
+Oft in life saw this umbrageous elm,
+Measuring its generous branches with my eye,
+And listened to its rejoicing leaves
+Lovingly patting each other
+With sweet aeolian whispers.
+And well they might:
+For the roots had grown so wide and deep
+That the soil of the hill could not withhold
+Aught of its virtue, enriched by rain,
+And warmed by the sun;
+But yielded it all to the thrifty roots,
+Through which it was drawn and whirled to the trunk,
+And thence to the branches, and into the leaves,
+Wherefrom the breeze took life and sang.
+Now I, an under-tenant of the earth, can see
+That the branches of a tree
+Spread no wider than its roots.
+And how shall the soul of a man
+Be larger than the life he has lived?
+
+
+
+
+Dow Kritt
+
+
+Samuel is forever talking of his elm—
+But I did not need to die to learn about roots:
+I, who dug all the ditches about Spoon River.
+Look at my elm!
+Sprung from as good a seed as his,
+Sown at the same time,
+It is dying at the top:
+Not from lack of life, nor fungus,
+Nor destroying insect, as the sexton thinks.
+Look, Samuel, where the roots have struck rock,
+And can no further spread.
+And all the while the top of the tree
+Is tiring itself out, and dying,
+Trying to grow.
+
+
+
+
+William Jones
+
+
+Once in a while a curious weed unknown to me,
+Needing a name from my books;
+Once in a while a letter from Yeomans.
+Out of the mussel-shells gathered along the shore
+Sometimes a pearl with a glint like meadow rue:
+Then betimes a letter from Tyndall in England,
+Stamped with the stamp of Spoon River.
+I, lover of Nature, beloved for my love of her,
+Held such converse afar with the great
+Who knew her better than I.
+Oh, there is neither lesser nor greater,
+Save as we make her greater and win from her keener delight.
+With shells from the river cover me, cover me.
+I lived in wonder, worshipping earth and heaven.
+I have passed on the march eternal of endless life.
+
+
+
+
+William Goode
+
+
+To all in the village I seemed, no doubt,
+To go this way and that way, aimlessly.
+But here by the river you can see at twilight
+The soft-winged bats fly zig-zag here and there—
+They must fly so to catch their food.
+And if you have ever lost your way at night,
+In the deep wood near Miller’s Ford,
+And dodged this way and now that,
+Wherever the light of the Milky Way shone through,
+Trying to find the path,
+You should understand I sought the way
+With earnest zeal, and all my wanderings
+Were wanderings in the quest.
+
+
+
+
+J. Milton Miles
+
+
+Whenever the Presbyterian bell
+Was rung by itself, I knew it as the Presbyterian bell.
+But when its sound was mingled
+With the sound of the Methodist, the Christian,
+The Baptist and the Congregational,
+I could no longer distinguish it,
+Nor any one from the others, or either of them.
+And as many voices called to me in life
+Marvel not that I could not tell
+The true from the false,
+Nor even, at last, the voice that
+I should have known.
+
+
+
+
+Faith Matheny
+
+
+At first you will know not what they mean,
+And you may never know,
+And we may never tell you:—
+These sudden flashes in your soul,
+Like lambent lightning on snowy clouds
+At midnight when the moon is full.
+They come in solitude, or perhaps
+You sit with your friend, and all at once
+A silence falls on speech, and his eyes
+Without a flicker glow at you:—
+You two have seen the secret together,
+He sees it in you, and you in him.
+And there you sit thrilling lest the Mystery
+Stand before you and strike you dead
+With a splendor like the sun’s.
+Be brave, all souls who have such visions
+As your body’s alive as mine is dead,
+You’re catching a little whiff of the ether
+Reserved for God Himself.
+
+
+
+
+Scholfield Hurley
+
+
+God! ask me not to record your wonders,
+I admit the stars and the suns
+And the countless worlds.
+But I have measured their distances
+And weighed them and discovered their substances.
+I have devised wings for the air,
+And keels for water,
+And horses of iron for the earth.
+I have lengthened the vision you gave me a million times,
+And the hearing you gave me a million times,
+I have leaped over space with speech,
+And taken fire for light out of the air.
+I have built great cities and bored through the hills,
+And bridged majestic waters.
+I have written the Iliad and Hamlet;
+And I have explored your mysteries,
+And searched for you without ceasing,
+And found you again after losing you
+In hours of weariness—
+And I ask you:
+How would you like to create a sun
+And the next day have the worms
+Slipping in and out between your fingers?
+
+
+
+
+Willie Metcalf
+
+
+I was Willie Metcalf.
+They used to call me “Doctor Meyers,”
+Because, they said, I looked like him.
+And he was my father, according to Jack McGuire.
+I lived in the livery stable,
+Sleeping on the floor
+Side by side with Roger Baughman’s bulldog,
+Or sometimes in a stall.
+I could crawl between the legs of the wildest horses
+Without getting kicked—we knew each other.
+On spring days I tramped through the country
+To get the feeling, which I sometimes lost,
+That I was not a separate thing from the earth.
+I used to lose myself, as if in sleep,
+By lying with eyes half-open in the woods.
+Sometimes I talked with animals—even toads and snakes—
+Anything that had an eye to look into.
+Once I saw a stone in the sunshine
+Trying to turn into jelly.
+In April days in this cemetery
+The dead people gathered all about me,
+And grew still, like a congregation in silent prayer.
+I never knew whether I was a part of the earth
+With flowers growing in me, or whether I walked—
+Now I know.
+
+
+
+
+Willie Pennington
+
+
+They called me the weakling, the simpleton,
+For my brothers were strong and beautiful,
+While I, the last child of parents who had aged,
+Inherited only their residue of power.
+But they, my brothers, were eaten up
+In the fury of the flesh, which I had not,
+Made pulp in the activity of the senses, which I had not,
+Hardened by the growth of the lusts, which I had not,
+Though making names and riches for themselves.
+Then I, the weak one, the simpleton,
+Resting in a little corner of life,
+Saw a vision, and through me many saw the vision,
+Not knowing it was through me.
+Thus a tree sprang
+From me, a mustard seed.
+
+
+
+
+The Village Atheist
+
+
+Ye young debaters over the doctrine
+Of the soul’s immortality
+I who lie here was the village atheist,
+Talkative, contentious, versed in the arguments
+Of the infidels. But through a long sickness
+Coughing myself to death I read the
+Upanishads and the poetry of Jesus.
+And they lighted a torch of hope and intuition
+And desire which the Shadow
+Leading me swiftly through the caverns of darkness,
+Could not extinguish.
+Listen to me, ye who live in the senses
+And think through the senses only:
+Immortality is not a gift,
+Immortality is an achievement;
+And only those who strive mightily
+Shall possess it.
+
+
+
+
+John Ballard
+
+
+In the lust of my strength
+I cursed God, but he paid no attention to me:
+I might as well have cursed the stars.
+In my last sickness I was in agony, but I was resolute
+And I cursed God for my suffering;
+Still He paid no attention to me;
+He left me alone, as He had always done.
+I might as well have cursed the Presbyterian steeple.
+Then, as I grew weaker, a terror came over me:
+Perhaps I had alienated God by cursing him.
+One day Lydia Humphrey brought me a bouquet
+And it occurred to me to try to make friends with God,
+So I tried to make friends with Him;
+But I might as well have tried to make friends with the bouquet.
+Now I was very close to the secret,
+For I really could make friends with the bouquet
+By holding close to me the love in me for the bouquet
+And so I was creeping upon the secret, but—
+
+
+
+
+Julian Scott
+
+
+Toward the last
+The truth of others was untruth to me;
+The justice of others injustice to me;
+Their reasons for death, reasons with me for life;
+Their reasons for life, reasons with me for death;
+I would have killed those they saved,
+And save those they killed.
+And I saw how a god, if brought to earth,
+Must act out what he saw and thought,
+And could not live in this world of men
+And act among them side by side
+Without continual clashes.
+The dust’s for crawling, heaven’s for flying—
+Wherefore, O soul, whose wings are grown,
+Soar upward to the sun!
+
+
+
+
+Alfonso Churchill
+
+
+They laughed at me as “Prof. Moon,”
+As a boy in Spoon River, born with the thirst
+Of knowing about the stars.
+They jeered when I spoke of the lunar mountains,
+And the thrilling heat and cold,
+And the ebon valleys by silver peaks,
+And Spica quadrillions of miles away,
+And the littleness of man.
+But now that my grave is honored, friends,
+Let it not be because I taught
+The lore of the stars in Knox College,
+But rather for this: that through the stars
+I preached the greatness of man,
+Who is none the less a part of the scheme of things
+For the distance of Spica or the Spiral Nebulae;
+Nor any the less a part of the question
+Of what the drama means.
+
+
+
+
+Zilpha Marsh
+
+
+At four o’clock in late October
+I sat alone in the country school-house
+Back from the road, mid stricken fields,
+And an eddy of wind blew leaves on the pane,
+And crooned in the flue of the cannon-stove,
+With its open door blurring the shadows
+With the spectral glow of a dying fire.
+In an idle mood I was running the planchette—
+All at once my wrist grew limp,
+And my hand moved rapidly over the board,
+’Till the name of “Charles Guiteau” was spelled,
+Who threatened to materialize before me.
+I rose and fled from the room bare-headed
+Into the dusk, afraid of my gift.
+And after that the spirits swarmed—
+Chaucer, Caesar, Poe and Marlowe,
+Cleopatra and Mrs. Surratt—
+Wherever I went, with messages,—
+Mere trifling twaddle, Spoon River agreed.
+You talk nonsense to children, don’t you?
+And suppose I see what you never saw
+And never heard of and have no word for,
+I must talk nonsense when you ask me
+What it is I see!
+
+
+
+
+James Garber
+
+
+Do you remember, passer-by, the path
+I wore across the lot where now stands the opera house
+Hasting with swift feet to work through many years?
+Take its meaning to heart:
+You too may walk, after the hills at Miller’s Ford
+Seem no longer far away;
+Long after you see them near at hand,
+Beyond four miles of meadow;
+And after woman’s love is silent
+Saying no more: “I will save you.”
+And after the faces of friends and kindred
+Become as faded photographs, pitifully silent,
+Sad for the look which means:
+“We cannot help you.”
+And after you no longer reproach mankind
+With being in league against your soul’s uplifted hands—
+Themselves compelled at midnight and at noon
+To watch with steadfast eye their destinies;
+After you have these understandings, think of me
+And of my path, who walked therein and knew
+That neither man nor woman, neither toil,
+Nor duty, gold nor power
+Can ease the longing of the soul,
+The loneliness of the soul!
+
+
+
+
+Lydia Humphrey
+
+
+Back and forth, back and forth, to and from the church,
+With my Bible under my arm
+’Till I was gray and old;
+Unwedded, alone in the world,
+Finding brothers and sisters in the congregation,
+And children in the church.
+I know they laughed and thought me queer.
+I knew of the eagle souls that flew high in the sunlight,
+Above the spire of the church, and laughed at the church,
+Disdaining me, not seeing me.
+But if the high air was sweet to them, sweet was the church to me.
+It was the vision, vision, vision of the poets
+Democratized!
+
+
+
+
+Le Roy Goldman
+
+
+“What will you do when you come to die,
+If all your life long you have rejected Jesus,
+And know as you lie there,
+He is not your friend?”
+Over and over I said, I, the revivalist.
+Ah, yes! but there are friends and friends.
+And blessed are you, say I, who know all now,
+You who have lost ere you pass,
+A father or mother, or old grandfather or mother
+Some beautiful soul that lived life strongly
+And knew you all through, and loved you ever,
+Who would not fail to speak for you,
+And give God an intimate view of your soul
+As only one of your flesh could do it.
+That is the hand your hand will reach for,
+To lead you along the corridor
+To the court where you are a stranger!
+
+
+
+
+Gustav Richter
+
+
+After a long day of work in my hot—houses
+Sleep was sweet, but if you sleep on your left side
+Your dreams may be abruptly ended.
+I was among my flowers where some one
+Seemed to be raising them on trial,
+As if after-while to be transplanted
+To a larger garden of freer air.
+And I was disembodied vision
+Amid a light, as it were the sun
+Had floated in and touched the roof of glass
+Like a toy balloon and softly bursted,
+And etherealized in golden air.
+And all was silence, except the splendor
+Was immanent with thought as clear
+As a speaking voice, and I, as thought,
+Could hear a Presence think as he walked
+Between the boxes pinching off leaves,
+Looking for bugs and noting values,
+With an eye that saw it all:
+“Homer, oh yes! Pericles, good.
+Caesar Borgia, what shall be done with it?
+Dante, too much manure, perhaps.
+Napoleon, leave him awhile as yet.
+Shelley, more soil. Shakespeare, needs spraying—”
+Clouds, eh!—
+
+
+
+
+Arlo Will
+
+
+Did you ever see an alligator
+Come up to the air from the mud,
+Staring blindly under the full glare of noon?
+Have you seen the stabled horses at night
+Tremble and start back at the sight of a lantern?
+Have you ever walked in darkness
+When an unknown door was open before you
+And you stood, it seemed, in the light of a thousand candles
+Of delicate wax?
+Have you walked with the wind in your ears
+And the sunlight about you
+And found it suddenly shine with an inner splendor?
+Out of the mud many times
+Before many doors of light
+Through many fields of splendor,
+Where around your steps a soundless glory scatters
+Like new-fallen snow,
+Will you go through earth, O strong of soul,
+And through unnumbered heavens
+To the final flame!
+
+
+
+
+Captain Orlando Killion
+
+
+Oh, you young radicals and dreamers,
+You dauntless fledglings
+Who pass by my headstone,
+Mock not its record of my captaincy in the army
+And my faith in God!
+They are not denials of each other.
+Go by reverently, and read with sober care
+How a great people, riding with defiant shouts
+The centaur of Revolution,
+Spurred and whipped to frenzy,
+Shook with terror, seeing the mist of the sea
+Over the precipice they were nearing,
+And fell from his back in precipitate awe
+To celebrate the Feast of the Supreme Being.
+Moved by the same sense of vast reality
+Of life and death, and burdened as they were
+With the fate of a race,
+How was I, a little blasphemer,
+Caught in the drift of a nation’s unloosened flood,
+To remain a blasphemer,
+And a captain in the army?
+
+
+
+
+Jeremy Carlisle
+
+
+Passer-by, sin beyond any sin
+Is the sin of blindness of souls to other souls.
+And joy beyond any joy is the joy
+Of having the good in you seen, and seeing the good
+At the miraculous moment!
+Here I confess to a lofty scorn,
+And an acrid skepticism.
+But do you remember the liquid that Penniwit
+Poured on tintypes making them blue
+With a mist like hickory smoke?
+Then how the picture began to clear
+Till the face came forth like life?
+So you appeared to me, neglected ones,
+And enemies too, as I went along
+With my face growing clearer to you as yours
+Grew clearer to me.
+We were ready then to walk together
+And sing in chorus and chant the dawn
+Of life that is wholly life.
+
+
+
+
+Joseph Dixon
+
+
+Who carved this shattered harp on my stone?
+I died to you, no doubt. But how many harps and pianos
+Wired I and tightened and disentangled for you,
+Making them sweet again—with tuning fork or without?
+Oh well! A harp leaps out of the ear of a man, you say,
+But whence the ear that orders the length of the strings
+To a magic of numbers flying before your thought
+Through a door that closes against your breathless wonder?
+Is there no Ear round the ear of a man, that it senses
+Through strings and columns of air the soul of sound?
+I thrill as I call it a tuning fork that catches
+The waves of mingled music and light from afar,
+The antennæ of Thought that listens through utmost space.
+Surely the concord that ruled my spirit is proof
+Of an Ear that tuned me, able to tune me over
+And use me again if I am worthy to use.
+
+
+
+
+Judson Stoddard
+
+
+On a mountain top above the clouds
+That streamed like a sea below me
+I said that peak is the thought of Budda,
+And that one is the prayer of Jesus,
+And this one is the dream of Plato,
+And that one there the song of Dante,
+And this is Kant and this is Newton,
+And this is Milton and this is Shakespeare,
+And this the hope of the Mother Church,
+And this—why all these peaks are poems,
+Poems and prayers that pierce the clouds.
+And I said “What does God do with mountains
+That rise almost to heaven?”
+
+
+
+
+Russell Kincaid
+
+
+In the last spring I ever knew,
+In those last days, I sat in the forsaken orchard
+Where beyond fields of greenery shimmered
+The hills at Miller’s Ford;
+Just to muse on the apple tree
+With its ruined trunk and blasted branches,
+And shoots of green whose delicate blossoms
+Were sprinkled over the skeleton tangle,
+Never to grow in fruit.
+And there was I with my spirit girded
+By the flesh half dead, the senses numb
+Yet thinking of youth and the earth in youth,—
+Such phantom blossoms palely shining
+Over the lifeless boughs of Time.
+O earth that leaves us ere heaven takes us!
+Had I been only a tree to shiver
+With dreams of spring and a leafy youth,
+Then I had fallen in the cyclone
+Which swept me out of the soul’s suspense
+Where it’s neither earth nor heaven.
+
+
+
+
+Aaron Hatfield
+
+
+Better than granite, Spoon River,
+Is the memory-picture you keep of me
+Standing before the pioneer men and women
+There at Concord Church on Communion day.
+Speaking in broken voice of the peasant youth
+Of Galilee who went to the city
+And was killed by bankers and lawyers;
+My voice mingling with the June wind
+That blew over wheat fields from Atterbury;
+While the white stones in the burying ground
+Around the Church shimmered in the summer sun.
+And there, though my own memories
+Were too great to bear, were you, O pioneers,
+With bowed heads breathing forth your sorrow
+For the sons killed in battle and the daughters
+And little children who vanished in life’s morning,
+Or at the intolerable hour of noon.
+But in those moments of tragic silence,
+When the wine and bread were passed,
+Came the reconciliation for us—
+Us the ploughmen and the hewers of wood,
+Us the peasants, brothers of the peasant of Galilee—
+To us came the Comforter
+And the consolation of tongues of flame!
+
+
+
+
+Isaiah Beethoven
+
+
+They told me I had three months to live,
+So I crept to Bernadotte,
+And sat by the mill for hours and hours
+Where the gathered waters deeply moving
+Seemed not to move:
+O world, that’s you!
+You are but a widened place in the river
+Where Life looks down and we rejoice for her
+Mirrored in us, and so we dream
+And turn away, but when again
+We look for the face, behold the low-lands
+And blasted cotton-wood trees where we empty
+Into the larger stream!
+But here by the mill the castled clouds
+Mocked themselves in the dizzy water;
+And over its agate floor at night
+The flame of the moon ran under my eyes
+Amid a forest stillness broken
+By a flute in a hut on the hill.
+At last when I came to lie in bed
+Weak and in pain, with the dreams about me,
+The soul of the river had entered my soul,
+And the gathered power of my soul was moving
+So swiftly it seemed to be at rest
+Under cities of cloud and under
+Spheres of silver and changing worlds—
+Until I saw a flash of trumpets
+Above the battlements over Time.
+
+
+
+
+Elijah Browning
+
+
+I was among multitudes of children
+Dancing at the foot of a mountain.
+A breeze blew out of the east and swept them as leaves,
+Driving some up the slopes. . . .
+All was changed.
+Here were flying lights, and mystic moons, and dream-music.
+A cloud fell upon us.
+When it lifted all was changed.
+I was now amid multitudes who were wrangling.
+Then a figure in shimmering gold, and one with a trumpet,
+And one with a sceptre stood before me.
+They mocked me and danced a rigadoon and vanished. . . .
+All was changed again.
+Out of a bower of poppies
+A woman bared her breasts and lifted her open mouth to mine.
+I kissed her.
+The taste of her lips was like salt.
+She left blood on my lips.
+I fell exhausted.
+I arose and ascended higher, but a mist as from an iceberg
+Clouded my steps.
+I was cold and in pain.
+Then the sun streamed on me again,
+And I saw the mists below me hiding all below them.
+And I, bent over my staff, knew myself
+Silhouetted against the snow. And above me
+Was the soundless air, pierced by a cone of ice,
+Over which hung a solitary star!
+A shudder of ecstasy, a shudder of fear
+Ran through me.
+But I could not return to the slopes—
+Nay, I wished not to return.
+For the spent waves of the symphony of freedom
+Lapped the ethereal cliffs about me.
+Therefore I climbed to the pinnacle.
+I flung away my staff.
+I touched that star
+With my outstretched hand.
+I vanished utterly.
+For the mountain delivers to Infinite Truth
+Whosoever touches the star.
+
+
+
+
+Webster Ford
+
+
+Do you remember, O Delphic Apollo,
+The sunset hour by the river, when Mickey M’Grew
+Cried, “There’s a ghost,” and I, “It’s Delphic Apollo”;
+And the son of the banker derided us, saying, “It’s light
+By the flags at the water’s edge, you half-witted fools.”
+And from thence, as the wearisome years rolled on, long after
+Poor Mickey fell down in the water tower to his death
+Down, down, through bellowing darkness, I carried
+The vision which perished with him like a rocket which falls
+And quenches its light in earth, and hid it for fear
+Of the son of the banker, calling on Plutus to save me?
+Avenged were you for the shame of a fearful heart
+Who left me alone till I saw you again in an hour
+When I seemed to be turned to a tree with trunk and branches
+Growing indurate, turning to stone, yet burgeoning
+In laurel leaves, in hosts of lambent laurel,
+Quivering, fluttering, shrinking, fighting the numbness
+Creeping into their veins from the dying trunk and branches!
+’Tis vain, O youth, to fly the call of Apollo.
+Fling yourselves in the fire, die with a song of spring,
+If die you must in the spring. For none shall look
+On the face of Apollo and live, and choose you must
+’Twixt death in the flame and death after years of sorrow,
+Rooted fast in the earth, feeling the grisly hand,
+Not so much in the trunk as in the terrible numbness
+Creeping up to the laurel leaves that never cease
+To flourish until you fall. O leaves of me
+Too sere for coronal wreaths, and fit alone
+For urns of memory, treasured, perhaps, as themes
+For hearts heroic, fearless singers and livers—
+Delphic Apollo!
+
+
+
+
+The Spooniad
+
+
+[_The late Mr. Jonathan Swift Somers, laureate of Spoon River (see page
+111), planned The Spooniad as an epic in twenty-four books, but
+unfortunately did not live to complete even the first book. The
+fragment was found among his papers by William Marion Reedy and was for
+the first time published in Reedy’s Mirror of December 18th, 1914._]
+
+
+Of John Cabanis’ wrath and of the strife
+Of hostile parties, and his dire defeat
+Who led the common people in the cause
+Of freedom for Spoon River, and the fall
+Of Rhodes, bank that brought unnumbered woes
+And loss to many, with engendered hate
+That flamed into the torch in Anarch hands
+To burn the court-house, on whose blackened wreck
+A fairer temple rose and Progress stood—
+Sing, muse, that lit the Chian’s face with smiles
+Who saw the ant-like Greeks and Trojans crawl
+About Scamander, over walls, pursued
+Or else pursuing, and the funeral pyres
+And sacred hecatombs, and first because
+Of Helen who with Paris fled to Troy
+As soul-mate; and the wrath of Peleus, son,
+Decreed to lose Chryseis, lovely spoil
+Of war, and dearest concubine.
+
+Say first,
+Thou son of night, called Momus, from whose eyes
+No secret hides, and Thalia, smiling one,
+What bred ’twixt Thomas Rhodes and John Cabanis
+The deadly strife? His daughter Flossie, she,
+Returning from her wandering with a troop
+Of strolling players, walked the village streets,
+Her bracelets tinkling and with sparkling rings
+And words of serpent wisdom and a smile
+Of cunning in her eyes. Then Thomas Rhodes,
+Who ruled the church and ruled the bank as well,
+Made known his disapproval of the maid;
+And all Spoon River whispered and the eyes
+Of all the church frowned on her, till she knew
+They feared her and condemned.
+
+But them to flout
+She gave a dance to viols and to flutes,
+Brought from Peoria, and many youths,
+But lately made regenerate through the prayers
+Of zealous preachers and of earnest souls,
+Danced merrily, and sought her in the dance,
+Who wore a dress so low of neck that eyes
+Down straying might survey the snowy swale
+’Till it was lost in whiteness.
+
+With the dance
+The village changed to merriment from gloom.
+The milliner, Mrs. Williams, could not fill
+Her orders for new hats, and every seamstress
+Plied busy needles making gowns; old trunks
+And chests were opened for their store of laces
+And rings and trinkets were brought out of hiding
+And all the youths fastidious grew of dress;
+Notes passed, and many a fair one’s door at eve
+Knew a bouquet, and strolling lovers thronged
+About the hills that overlooked the river.
+Then, since the mercy seats more empty showed,
+One of God’s chosen lifted up his voice:
+“The woman of Babylon is among us; rise
+Ye sons of light and drive the wanton forth!”
+So John Cabanis left the church and left
+The hosts of law and order with his eyes
+By anger cleared, and him the liberal cause
+Acclaimed as nominee to the mayoralty
+To vanquish A. D. Blood.
+
+But as the war
+Waged bitterly for votes and rumors flew
+About the bank, and of the heavy loans
+Which Rhodes, son had made to prop his loss
+In wheat, and many drew their coin and left
+The bank of Rhodes more hollow, with the talk
+Among the liberals of another bank
+Soon to be chartered, lo, the bubble burst
+’Mid cries and curses; but the liberals laughed
+And in the hall of Nicholas Bindle held
+Wise converse and inspiriting debate.
+
+High on a stage that overlooked the chairs
+Where dozens sat, and where a pop-eyed daub
+Of Shakespeare, very like the hired man
+Of Christian Dallman, brow and pointed beard,
+Upon a drab proscenium outward stared,
+Sat Harmon Whitney, to that eminence,
+By merit raised in ribaldry and guile,
+And to the assembled rebels thus he spake:
+“Whether to lie supine and let a clique
+Cold-blooded, scheming, hungry, singing psalms,
+Devour our substance, wreck our banks and drain
+Our little hoards for hazards on the price
+Of wheat or pork, or yet to cower beneath
+The shadow of a spire upreared to curb
+A breed of lackeys and to serve the bank
+Coadjutor in greed, that is the question.
+Shall we have music and the jocund dance,
+Or tolling bells? Or shall young romance roam
+These hills about the river, flowering now
+To April’s tears, or shall they sit at home,
+Or play croquet where Thomas Rhodes may see,
+I ask you? If the blood of youth runs o’er
+And riots ’gainst this regimen of gloom,
+Shall we submit to have these youths and maids
+Branded as libertines and wantons?”
+
+Ere
+His words were done a woman’s voice called “No!”
+Then rose a sound of moving chairs, as when
+The numerous swine o’er-run the replenished troughs;
+And every head was turned, as when a flock
+Of geese back-turning to the hunter’s tread
+Rise up with flapping wings; then rang the hall
+With riotous laughter, for with battered hat
+Tilted upon her saucy head, and fist
+Raised in defiance, Daisy Fraser stood.
+Headlong she had been hurled from out the hall
+Save Wendell Bloyd, who spoke for woman’s rights,
+Prevented, and the bellowing voice of Burchard.
+Then, mid applause she hastened toward the stage
+And flung both gold and silver to the cause
+And swiftly left the hall.
+Meantime upstood
+A giant figure, bearded like the son
+Of Alcmene, deep-chested, round of paunch,
+And spoke in thunder: “Over there behold
+A man who for the truth withstood his wife—
+Such is our spirit—when that A. D. Blood
+Compelled me to remove Dom Pedro—”
+
+Quick
+Before Jim Brown could finish, Jefferson Howard
+Obtained the floor and spake: “Ill suits the time
+For clownish words, and trivial is our cause
+If naught’s at stake but John Cabanis, wrath,
+He who was erstwhile of the other side
+And came to us for vengeance. More’s at stake
+Than triumph for New England or Virginia.
+And whether rum be sold, or for two years
+As in the past two years, this town be dry
+Matters but little— Oh yes, revenue
+For sidewalks, sewers; that is well enough!
+I wish to God this fight were now inspired
+By other passion than to salve the pride
+Of John Cabanis or his daughter. Why
+Can never contests of great moment spring
+From worthy things, not little? Still, if men
+Must always act so, and if rum must be
+The symbol and the medium to release
+From life’s denial and from slavery,
+Then give me rum!”
+
+Exultant cries arose.
+Then, as George Trimble had o’ercome his fear
+And vacillation and begun to speak,
+The door creaked and the idiot, Willie Metcalf,
+Breathless and hatless, whiter than a sheet,
+Entered and cried: “The marshal’s on his way
+To arrest you all. And if you only knew
+Who’s coming here to-morrow; I was listening
+Beneath the window where the other side
+Are making plans.”
+
+So to a smaller room
+To hear the idiot’s secret some withdrew
+Selected by the Chair; the Chair himself
+And Jefferson Howard, Benjamin Pantier,
+And Wendell Bloyd, George Trimble, Adam Weirauch,
+Imanuel Ehrenhardt, Seth Compton, Godwin James
+And Enoch Dunlap, Hiram Scates, Roy Butler,
+Carl Hamblin, Roger Heston, Ernest Hyde
+And Penniwit, the artist, Kinsey Keene,
+And E. C. Culbertson and Franklin Jones,
+Benjamin Fraser, son of Benjamin Pantier
+By Daisy Fraser, some of lesser note,
+And secretly conferred.
+
+But in the hall
+Disorder reigned and when the marshal came
+And found it so, he marched the hoodlums out
+And locked them up.
+
+Meanwhile within a room
+Back in the basement of the church, with Blood
+Counseled the wisest heads. Judge Somers first,
+Deep learned in life, and next him, Elliott Hawkins
+And Lambert Hutchins; next him Thomas Rhodes
+And Editor Whedon; next him Garrison Standard,
+A traitor to the liberals, who with lip
+Upcurled in scorn and with a bitter sneer:
+“Such strife about an insult to a woman—
+A girl of eighteen” —Christian Dallman too,
+And others unrecorded. Some there were
+Who frowned not on the cup but loathed the rule
+Democracy achieved thereby, the freedom
+And lust of life it symbolized.
+
+Now morn with snowy fingers up the sky
+Flung like an orange at a festival
+The ruddy sun, when from their hasty beds
+Poured forth the hostile forces, and the streets
+Resounded to the rattle of the wheels
+That drove this way and that to gather in
+The tardy voters, and the cries of chieftains
+Who manned the battle. But at ten o’clock
+The liberals bellowed fraud, and at the polls
+The rival candidates growled and came to blows.
+Then proved the idiot’s tale of yester-eve
+A word of warning. Suddenly on the streets
+Walked hog-eyed Allen, terror of the hills
+That looked on Bernadotte ten miles removed.
+No man of this degenerate day could lift
+The boulders which he threw, and when he spoke
+The windows rattled, and beneath his brows
+Thatched like a shed with bristling hair of black,
+His small eyes glistened like a maddened boar.
+And as he walked the boards creaked, as he walked
+A song of menace rumbled. Thus he came,
+The champion of A. D. Blood, commissioned
+To terrify the liberals. Many fled
+As when a hawk soars o’er the chicken yard.
+He passed the polls and with a playful hand
+Touched Brown, the giant, and he fell against,
+As though he were a child, the wall; so strong
+Was hog-eyed Allen. But the liberals smiled.
+For soon as hog-eyed Allen reached the walk,
+Close on his steps paced Bengal Mike, brought in
+By Kinsey Keene, the subtle-witted one,
+To match the hog-eyed Allen. He was scarce
+Three-fourths the other’s bulk, but steel his arms,
+And with a tiger’s heart. Two men he killed
+And many wounded in the days before,
+And no one feared.
+
+But when the hog-eyed one
+Saw Bengal Mike his countenance grew dark,
+The bristles o’er his red eyes twitched with rage,
+The song he rumbled lowered. Round and round
+The court-house paced he, followed stealthily
+By Bengal Mike, who jeered him every step:
+“Come, elephant, and fight! Come, hog-eyed coward!
+Come, face about and fight me, lumbering sneak!
+Come, beefy bully, hit me, if you can!
+Take out your gun, you duffer, give me reason
+To draw and kill you. Take your billy out.
+I’ll crack your boar’s head with a piece of brick!”
+But never a word the hog-eyed one returned
+But trod about the court-house, followed both
+By troops of boys and watched by all the men.
+All day, they walked the square. But when Apollo
+Stood with reluctant look above the hills
+As fain to see the end, and all the votes
+Were cast, and closed the polls, before the door
+Of Trainor’s drug store Bengal Mike, in tones
+That echoed through the village, bawled the taunt:
+“Who was your mother, hog—eyed?” In a trice
+As when a wild boar turns upon the hound
+That through the brakes upon an August day
+Has gashed him with its teeth, the hog-eyed one
+Rushed with his giant arms on Bengal Mike
+And grabbed him by the throat. Then rose to heaven
+The frightened cries of boys, and yells of men
+Forth rushing to the street. And Bengal Mike
+Moved this way and now that, drew in his head
+As if his neck to shorten, and bent down
+To break the death grip of the hog-eyed one;
+’Twixt guttural wrath and fast-expiring strength
+Striking his fists against the invulnerable chest
+Of hog-eyed Allen. Then, when some came in
+To part them, others stayed them, and the fight
+Spread among dozens; many valiant souls
+Went down from clubs and bricks.
+
+But tell me, Muse,
+What god or goddess rescued Bengal Mike?
+With one last, mighty struggle did he grasp
+The murderous hands and turning kick his foe.
+Then, as if struck by lightning, vanished all
+The strength from hog-eyed Allen, at his side
+Sank limp those giant arms and o’er his face
+Dread pallor and the sweat of anguish spread.
+And those great knees, invincible but late,
+Shook to his weight. And quickly as the lion
+Leaps on its wounded prey, did Bengal Mike
+Smite with a rock the temple of his foe,
+And down he sank and darkness o’er his eyes
+Passed like a cloud.
+
+As when the woodman fells
+Some giant oak upon a summer’s day
+And all the songsters of the forest shrill,
+And one great hawk that has his nestling young
+Amid the topmost branches croaks, as crash
+The leafy branches through the tangled boughs
+Of brother oaks, so fell the hog-eyed one
+Amid the lamentations of the friends
+Of A. D. Blood.
+
+Just then, four lusty men
+Bore the town marshal, on whose iron face
+The purple pall of death already lay,
+To Trainor’s drug store, shot by Jack McGuire.
+And cries went up of “Lynch him!” and the sound
+Of running feet from every side was heard
+Bent on the
+
+
+
+
+Epilogue
+
+
+(THE GRAVEYARD OF SPOON RIVER. TWO VOICES ARE HEARD BEHIND A SCREEN
+DECORATED WITH DIABOLICAL AND ANGELIC FIGURES IN VARIOUS ALLEGORICAL
+RELATIONS. A FAINT LIGHT SHOWS DIMLY THROUGH THE SCREEN AS IF IT WERE
+WOVEN OF LEAVES, BRANCHES AND SHADOWS.)
+
+
+FIRST VOICE.
+A game of checkers?
+
+SECOND VOICE
+Well, I don’t mind.
+
+FIRST VOICE
+I move the Will.
+
+SECOND VOICE
+You’re playing it blind.
+
+FIRST VOICE
+Then here’s the Soul.
+
+SECOND VOICE
+Checked by the Will.
+
+FIRST VOICE
+Eternal Good!
+
+SECOND VOICE
+And Eternal Ill.
+
+FIRST VOICE
+I haste for the King row.
+
+SECOND VOICE
+Save your breath.
+
+FIRST VOICE
+I was moving Life.
+
+SECOND VOICE
+You’re checked by Death.
+
+FIRST VOICE
+Very good, here’s Moses.
+
+SECOND VOICE
+And here’s the Jew.
+
+FIRST VOICE
+My next move is Jesus.
+
+SECOND VOICE
+St. Paul for you!
+
+FIRST VOICE
+Yes, but St. Peter—
+
+SECOND VOICE
+You might have foreseen—
+
+FIRST VOICE
+You’re in the King row—
+
+SECOND VOICE
+With Constantine!
+
+FIRST VOICE
+I’ll go back to Athens.
+
+SECOND VOICE
+Well, here’s the Persian.
+
+FIRST VOICE
+All right, the Bible.
+
+SECOND VOICE
+Pray now, what version?
+
+FIRST VOICE
+I take up Buddha.
+
+SECOND VOICE
+It never will work.
+
+FIRST VOICE
+From the corner Mahomet.
+
+SECOND VOICE
+I move the Turk.
+
+FIRST VOICE
+The game is tangled; where are we now?
+
+SECOND VOICE
+You’re dreaming worlds. I’m in the King row.
+Move as you will, if I can’t wreck you
+I’ll thwart you, harry you, rout you, check you.
+
+FIRST VOICE
+I’m tired. I’ll send for my Son to play.
+I think he can beat you finally—
+
+SECOND VOICE
+Eh?
+
+FIRST VOICE
+I must preside at the stars’ convention.
+
+SECOND VOICE
+Very well, my lord, but I beg to mention
+I’ll give this game my direct attention.
+
+FIRST VOICE
+A game indeed! But Truth is my quest.
+
+SECOND VOICE
+Beaten, you walk away with a jest.
+I strike the table, I scatter the checkers.
+(_A rattle of a falling table and checkers flying over a floor_.)
+Aha! You armies and iron deckers,
+Races and states in a cataclysm—
+Now for a day of atheism!
+
+
+(_The screen vanishes and_ BEELZEBUB _steps forward carrying a trumpet,
+which he blows faintly. Immediately_ LOKI _and_ YOCARINDRA _start up
+from the shadows of night._)
+
+
+BEELZEBUB
+Good evening, Loki!
+
+LOKI
+The same to you!
+
+BEELZEBUB
+And Yogarindra!
+
+YOGARINDRA
+My greetings, too.
+
+LOKI
+Whence came you, comrade?
+
+BEELZEBUB
+From yonder screen.
+
+YOGARINDRA
+And what were you doing?
+
+BEELZEBUB
+Stirring His spleen.
+
+LOKI
+How did you do it?
+
+BEELZEBUB
+I made it rough
+In a game of checkers.
+
+LOKI
+Good enough!
+
+YOGARINDRA
+I thought I heard the sounds of a battle.
+
+BEELZEBUB
+No doubt! I made the checkers rattle,
+Turning the table over and strewing
+The bits of wood like an army pursuing.
+
+YOGARINDRA
+I have a game! Let us make a man.
+
+LOKI
+My net is waiting him, if you can.
+
+YOGARINDRA
+And here’s my mirror to fool him with—
+
+BEELZEBUB
+Mystery, falsehood, creed and myth.
+
+LOKI
+But no one can mold him, friend, but you.
+
+BEELZEBUB
+Then to the sport without more ado.
+
+YOGARINDRA
+Hurry the work ere it grow to day.
+
+BEELZEBUB
+I set me to it. Where is the clay?
+(_He scrapes the earth with his hands and begins to model._)
+
+BEELZEBUB
+Out of the dust,
+Out of the slime,
+A little rust,
+And a little lime.
+Muscle and gristle,
+Mucin, stone
+Brayed with a pestle,
+Fat and bone.
+Out of the marshes,
+Out of the vaults,
+Matter crushes
+Gas and salts.
+What is this you call a mind,
+Flitting, drifting, pale and blind,
+Soul of the swamp that rides the wind?
+Jack-o’-lantern, here you are!
+Dream of heaven, pine for a star,
+Chase your brothers to and fro,
+Back to the swamp at last you’ll go.
+Hilloo! Hilloo!
+
+THE VALLEY
+Hilloo! Hilloo!
+(_Beelzebub in scraping up the earth turns out a skull._)
+
+BEELZEBUB
+Old one, old one.
+Now ere I break you
+Crush you and make you
+Clay for my use,
+Let me observe you:
+You were a bold one
+Flat at the dome of you,
+Heavy the base of you,
+False to the home of you,
+Strong was the face of you,
+Strange to all fears.
+Yet did the hair of you
+Hide what you were.
+Now to re-nerve you—
+
+(_He crushes the skull between his hands and mixes it with the clay._)
+
+
+Now you are dust,
+Limestone and rust.
+I mold and I stir
+And make you again.
+
+THE VALLEY
+Again? Again?
+
+(_In the same manner_ BEELZEBUB _has fashioned several figures,
+standing them against the trees._)
+
+
+LOKI
+Now for the breath of life. As I remember
+You have done right to mold your creatures first,
+And stand them up.
+
+BEELZEBUB
+From gravitation
+I make the will.
+
+YOGARINDRA
+Out of sensation
+Comes his ill.
+Out of my mirror
+Springs his error.
+Who was so cruel
+To make him the slave
+Of me the sorceress, you the knave,
+And you the plotter to catch his thought,
+Whatever he did, whatever he sought?
+With a nature dual
+Of will and mind,
+A thing that sees, and a thing that’s blind.
+Come! to our dance! Something hated him
+Made us over him, therefore fated him.
+
+(_They join hands and dance._)
+
+
+LOKI
+Passion, reason, custom, ruels,
+Creeds of the churches, lore of the schools,
+Taint in the blood and strength of soul.
+Flesh too weak for the will’s control;
+Poverty, riches, pride of birth,
+Wailing, laughter, over the earth.
+Here I have you caught again.
+Enter my web, ye sons of men.
+
+YOGARINDRA
+Look in my mirror! Isn’t it real?
+What do you think now, what do you feel?
+Here is treasure of gold heaped up;
+Here is wine in the festal cup.
+Tendrils blossoming, turned to whips,
+Love with her breasts and scarlet lips.
+Breathe in their nostrils.
+
+BEELZEBUB
+Falsehood’s breath,
+Out of nothingness into death.
+Out of the mold, out of the rocks,
+Wonder, mockery, paradox!
+Soaring spirit, groveling flesh,
+Bait the trap, and spread the mesh.
+Give him hunger, lure him with truth,
+Give him the iris hopes of Youth.
+Starve him, shame him, fling him down,
+Whirled in the vortex of the town.
+Break him, age him, till he curse
+The idiot face of the universe.
+Over and over we mix the clay,—
+What was dust is alive to-day.
+
+THE THREE
+Thus is the hell-born tangle wound
+Swiftly, swiftly round and round.
+
+BEELZEBUB
+(_Waving his trumpet._)
+You live! Away!
+
+ONE OF THE FIGURES
+How strange and new!
+I am I, and another, too.
+
+ANOTHER FIGURE
+I was a sun-dew’s leaf, but now
+What is this longing?—
+
+ANOTHER FIGURE
+Earth below
+I was a seedling magnet-tipped
+Drawn down earth—
+
+ANOTHER FIGURE
+And I was gripped
+Electrons in a granite stone,
+Now I think.
+
+ANOTHER FIGURE
+Oh, how alone!
+
+ANOTHER FIGURE
+My lips to thine. Through thee I find
+Something alone by love divined!
+
+BEELZEBUB
+Begone! No, wait. I have bethought me, friends;
+Let s give a play.
+
+(_He waves his trumpet._)
+
+
+To yonder green rooms go.
+
+(_The figures disappear._)
+
+
+YOGARINDRA
+Oh, yes, a play! That’s very well, I think,
+But who will be the audience? I must throw
+Illusion over all.
+
+LOKI
+And I must shift
+The scenery, and tangle up the plot.
+
+BEELZEBUB
+Well, so you shall! Our audience shall come
+From yonder graves.
+
+(_He blows his trumpet slightly louder than before. The scene changes.
+A stage arises among the graves. The curtain is down, concealing the
+creatures just created, illuminated halfway up by spectral lights._
+BEELZEBUB _stands before the curtain._)
+
+
+BEELZEBUB
+(_A terrific blast of the trumpet._)
+Who-o-o-o-o-o!
+
+(_Immediately there is a rustling as of the shells of grasshoppers
+stirred by a wind; and hundreds of the dead, including those who have
+appeared in the Anthology, hurry to the sound of the trumpet._)
+
+
+A VOICE
+Gabriel! Gabriel!
+
+MANY VOICES
+The Judgment day!
+
+BEELZEBUB
+Be quiet, if you please
+At least until the stars fall and the moon.
+
+MANY VOICES
+Save us! Save us!
+
+(_Beelzebub extends his hands over the audience with a benedictory
+motion and restores order._)
+
+
+BEELZEBUB
+Ladies and gentlemen, your kind attention
+To my interpretation of the scene.
+I rise to give your fancy comprehension,
+And analyze the parts of the machine.
+My mood is such that I would not deceive you,
+Though still a liar and the father of it,
+From judgment’s frailty I would retrieve you,
+Though falsehood is my art and though I love it.
+Down in the habitations whence I rise,
+The roots of human sorrow boundless spread.
+Long have I watched them draw the strength that lies
+In clay made richer by the rotting dead.
+Here is a blossom, here a twisted stalk,
+Here fruit that sourly withers ere its prime;
+And here a growth that sprawls across the walk,
+Food for the green worm, which it turns to slime.
+The ruddy apple with a core of cork
+Springs from a root which in a hollow dangles,
+Not skillful husbandry nor laborious work
+Can save the tree which lightning breaks and tangles.
+Why does the bright nasturtium scarcely flower
+But that those insects multiply and grow,
+Which make it food, and in the very hour
+In which the veined leaves and blossoms blow?
+Why does a goodly tree, while fast maturing,
+Turn crooked branches covered o’er with scale?
+Why does the tree whose youth was not assuring
+Prosper and bear while all its fellows fail?
+I under earth see much. I know the soil.
+I know where mold is heavy and where thin.
+I see the stones that thwart the plowman’s toil,
+The crooked roots of what the priests call sin.
+I know all secrets, even to the core,
+What seedlings will be upas, pine or laurel;
+It cannot change howe’er the field’s worked o’er.
+Man’s what he is and that’s the devil’s moral.
+So with the souls of the ensuing drama
+They sprang from certain seed in certain earth.
+Behold them in the devil’s cyclorama,
+Shown in their proper light for all they’re worth.
+Now to my task: I’ll give an exhibition
+Of mixing the ingredients of spirit.
+
+(_He waves his hand._)
+
+
+Come, crucible, perform your magic mission,
+Come, recreative fire, and hover near it!
+I’ll make a soul, or show how one is made.
+
+(_He waves his wand again. Parti-colored flames appear._)
+
+
+This is the woman you shall see anon!
+
+(_A red flame appears._)
+
+
+This hectic flame makes all the world afraid:
+It was a soldier’s scourge which ate the bone.
+His daughter bore the lady of the action.
+And died at thirty-nine of scrofula.
+She was a creature of a sweet attraction,
+Whose sex-obsession no one ever saw.
+
+(_A purple flame appears._)
+
+
+Lo! this denotes aristocratic strains
+Back in the centuries of France’s glory.
+
+(_A blue flame appears._)
+
+
+And this the will that pulls against the chains
+Her father strove until his hair was hoary.
+Sorrow and failure made his nature cold.
+He never loved the child whose woe is shown,
+And hence her passion for the things which gold
+Brings in this world of pride, and brings alone.
+The human heart that’s famished from its birth
+Turns to the grosser treasures, that is plain.
+Thus aspiration fallen fills the earth
+With jungle growths of bitterness and pain.
+Of Celtic, Gallic fire our heroine!
+Courageous, cruel, passionate and proud.
+False, vengeful, cunning, without fear o’ sin.
+A head that oft is bloody, but not bowed.
+Now if she meet a man—suppose our hero,
+With whom her chemistry shall war yet mix,
+As if she were her Borgia to his Nero,
+’Twill look like one of Satan’s little tricks!
+However, it must be. The world’s great garden
+Is not all mine. I only sow the tares.
+Wheat should be made immune, or else the Warden
+Should stop their coming in the world’s affairs.
+But to our hero! Long ere he was born
+I knew what would repel him and attract.
+Such spirit mathematics, fig or thorn,
+I can prognosticate before the fact.
+
+(_A yellow flame appears._)
+
+
+This is a grandsire’s treason in an orchard
+Against a maid whose nature with his mated.
+
+(_Lurid flames appear._)
+
+
+And this his memory distrait and tortured,
+Which marked the child with hate because she hated.
+Our heroine’s grand dame was that maid’s own cousin—
+But never this our man and woman knew.
+The child, in time, of lovers had a dozen,
+Then wed a gentleman upright and true.
+And thus our hero had a double nature:
+One half of him was bad, the other good.
+The devil must exhaust his nomenclature
+To make this puzzle rightly understood.
+But when our hero and our heroine met
+They were at once attracted, the repulsion
+Was hidden under Passion, with her net
+Which must enmesh you ere you feel revulsion.
+The virus coursing in the soldier’s blood,
+The orchard’s ghost, the unknown kinship ’twixt them,
+Our hero’s mother’s lovers round them stood,
+Shadows that smiled to see how Fate had fixed them.
+This twain pledge vows and marry, that’s the play.
+And then the tragic features rise and deepen.
+He is a tender husband. When away
+The serpents from the orchard slyly creep in.
+Our heroine, born of spirit none too loyal,
+Picks fruit of knowledge—leaves the tree of life.
+Her fancy turns to France corrupt and royal,
+Soon she forgets her duty as a wife.
+You know the rest, so far as that’s concerned,
+She met exposure and her husband slew her.
+He lost his reason, for the love she spurned.
+He prized her as his own—how slight he knew her.
+(_He waves a wand, showing a man in a prison cell._)
+Now here he sits condemned to mount the gallows—
+He could not tell his story—he is dumb.
+Love, says your poets, is a grace that hallows,
+I call it suffering and martyrdom.
+The judge with pointed finger says, “You killed her.”
+Well, so he did—but here’s the explanation;
+He could not give it. I, the drama-builder,
+Show you the various truths and their relation.
+(_He waves his wand._)
+Now, to begin. The curtain is ascending,
+They meet at tea upon a flowery lawn.
+Fair, is it not? How sweet their souls are blending—
+The author calls the play “Laocoon.”
+
+A VOICE
+Only an earth dream.
+
+ANOTHER VOICE
+With which we are done.
+A flash of a comet
+Upon the earth stream.
+
+ANOTHER VOICE
+A dream twrice removed,
+A spectral confusion
+Of earth’s dread illusion.
+
+A FAR VOICE
+These are the ghosts
+From the desolate coasts.
+Would you go to them?
+Only pursue them.
+Whatever enshrined is
+Within you is you.
+In a place where no wind is,
+Out of the damps,
+Be ye as lamps.
+Flame-like aspire,
+To me alone true,
+The Life and the Fire.
+
+(BEELZEBUB, LOKI _and_ YOGARINDRA _vanish. The phantasmagoria fades
+out. Where the dead seemed to have assembled, only heaps of leaves
+appear. There is the light as of dawn. Voices of Spring._)
+
+
+FIRST VOICE
+The springtime is come, the winter departed.
+She wakens from slumber and dances light-hearted.
+The sun is returning,
+We are done with alarms,
+Earth lifts her face burning,
+Held close in his arms.
+The sun is an eagle
+Who broods o’er his young,
+The earth is his nursling
+In whom he has flung
+The life-flame in seed,
+In blossom desire,
+Till fire become life,
+And life become fire.
+
+SECOND VOICE
+I slip and I vanish,
+I baffle your eye;
+I dive and I climb,
+I change and I fly.
+You have me, you lose me,
+Who have me too well,
+Now find me and use me—
+I am here in a cell.
+
+THIRD VOICE
+You are there in a cell?
+Oh, now for a rod
+With which to divine you—
+
+SECOND VOICE
+Nay, child, I am God.
+
+FOURTH VOICE
+When the waking waters rise from their beds of snow, under the hill,
+In little rooms of stone where they sleep when icicles reign,
+The April breezes scurry through woodlands, saying “Fulfill!
+Awaken roots under cover of soil—it is Spring again.”
+Then the sun exults, the moon is at peace, and voices
+Call to the silver shadows to lift the flowers from their dreams.
+And a longing, longing enters my heart of sorrow, my heart that rejoices
+In the fleeting glimpse of a shining face, and her hair that gleams.
+I arise and follow alone for hours the winding way by the river.
+Hunting a vanishing light, and a solace for joy too deep.
+Where do you lead me, wild one, on and on forever?
+Over the hill, over the hill, and down to the meadows of sleep.
+
+THE SUN
+Over the soundless depths of space for a hundred million miles
+Speeds the soul of me, silent thunder, struck from a harp of fire.
+Before my eyes the planets wheel and a universe defiles,
+I but a luminant speck of dust upborne in a vast desire.
+What is my universe that obeys me—myself compelled to obey
+A power that holds me and whirls me over a path that has no end?
+And there are my children who call me great, the giver of life and day,
+Myself a child who cry for life and know not whither I tend.
+A million million suns above me, as if the curtain of night
+Were hung before creation’s flame, that shone through the weave of the cloth,
+Each with its worlds and worlds and worlds crying upward for light,
+For each is drawn in its course to what?—as the candle draws the moth.
+
+
+THE MILKY WAY
+Orbits unending,
+Life never ending,
+Power without end.
+
+A VOICE
+Wouldst thou be lord,
+Not peace but a sword.
+Not heart’s desire—
+Ever aspire.
+Worship thy power,
+Conquer thy hour,
+Sleep not but strive,
+So shalt thou live.
+
+INFINITE DEPTHS
+Infinite Law,
+Infinite Life.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1280 ***