EDGAR LEE MASTERS

 

*

From The Spoon River Anthology

 

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.

 

*

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.

Then 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 thought 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!

 

*

Trainor, the Druggest

 

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 mixer of chemicals,

Killed while making an experiment,

Lived unwedded.

 

*

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.

 

*

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,

Blessed 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.

 

*

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."

 

*

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?

 

*

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.

 

*

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.

 

*

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?