Spoon River Anthology
4/5
()
About this ebook
Edgar Lee Masters
Edgar LeeMasters (1868–1950) was an American attorney, poet, biographer, and dramatist. Born in Garnett, Kansas to attorney Hardin Wallace Masters and Emma Jerusha Dexter, they later moved to Lewistown, Illinois, where Masters attended high school and had his first publication in the Chicago Daily News. After working in his father’s law office, he was admitted to the Illinois State Bar and moved to Chicago. In 1898 he married Helen M. Jenkins and had three children. Masters died on March 5, 1950, in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania, at the age of eighty-one. He is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois.
Read more from Edgar Lee Masters
Spoon River Anthology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDomesday Book Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsToward the Gulf (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Open Sea (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe open Sea Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Great Valley (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSpoon River Anthology (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Mitch Miller Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMitch Miller (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStarved Rock Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Great Valley Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSpoon River Anthology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Spoon River Anthology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Songs and Satires Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe open sea Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsToward the Gulf Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDomesday Book Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsToward the Gulf Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChildren of the Market Place Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChildren of the Market Place Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Great Valley Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMitch Miller Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSongs and Satires Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSpoon River Anthology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Spoon River Anthology
Related ebooks
Cyrano de Bergerac Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Complete William Shakespeare Collection Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChicago Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Spring Awakening Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSalome: "The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death." Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Spoon River Anthology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Misanthrope Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Love's Labour's Lost (Annotated by Henry N. Hudson with an Introduction by Charles Harold Herford) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAnton Chekhov: Letters, Diary, Reminiscences & Biography: A Collection of Autobiographical Writings Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEugene O'Neill's America: Desire Under Democracy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ivanov Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complaisant Lover: A Play Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Teahouse of the August Moon Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHoly Ground: The National Black Theatre Festival Anthology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAntony and Cleopatra Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Bold Stroke for a Husband: "I have been five minutes too late all my life-time!" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Doll's House Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Andromache Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Uncle Vanya Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Pretentious Young Ladies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The House of Bernarda Alba (NHB Classic Plays) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn ideal husband Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWings of the Dove Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Man and Superman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Idiot Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMuch Ado About Nothing Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Death etc. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King Lear In Plain and Simple English (A Modern Translation and the Original Version) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAs You Like It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Poetry For You
The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beyond Thoughts: An Exploration Of Who We Are Beyond Our Minds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Things We Don't Talk About Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Letters to a Young Poet (Rediscovered Books): With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Spoon River Anthology
459 ratings17 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heard about this for the first time while reading Richard Price's Samaritan. It's a tremendous achievement. Witty and dour, morbid and feather-light. I will have to dip back into it again for all human life can be found within.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Whether because of emotional connections to the moments when I discovered individual poems, or the fact that such close study in acting class yoked me to this book (both figuratively and literally), I adore Masters' concept and his execution. It is perhaps not perfect, and yet could anyone pull this off personally? Either way, I'm never going to be objective about this book, so I shan't waste time trying!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I can appreciate why, at the time of its publication in 1915, the book was seen as creative in its structure -- lots of short poems, each in the voice or a different deceased former resident of the town of Spoon River, Illinois -- and bracingly blunt in its substance. Some of the deceased admit to having committed murder or adultery; others offer sardonic reflections - all is vanity and chasing the wind. Since then, of course, the themes have become commonplace, and been explored with greater nuance and explicitness elsewhere. The structure has been imitated in other works - a prose example is the book 253, by Geoff Ryman, with each chapter about a different passenger on an ill-fated subway train. While the Spoon River Anthology now seems relatively tame, it's still enjoyable, and the trick of offering one story from a handful of radically divergent points of view still works. Many of the poems are forgettable, but some are haunting: Mickey M'Grew, who died cleaning the town water tank; Conrad Siever, buried under one of his apple trees; Mrs. Sibley, pastor's wife and free spirit; Elsa Wertman, German immigrant and mother of a successful politician who has no idea he is her son.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Published in 1915, each poem in this volume is a monologue spoken by a dead person. It is as if the reader is visiting a cemetery in the fictional town of Spoon River, and each name on a tombstone speaks for himself or herself. People from all walks of society are here. Much is revealed here. The reader often understands what each person is trying to say. It’s not necessarily all morbid or maudlin.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For what could have just been a gimmick, it turns out to be surprisingly good.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Masters created a town of Spoon River and lets us look into the goings on there. This is nothing unusual in fiction. However, in this case we see the town through the voices of the dead. Every piece in this collection of free verse is that of one of the former inhabitants speaking from the grave. Some are funny, some of gut-wrenchingly sad, some are inspiring. Some connect together so a bit of a story emerges; many stand along.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of short free-form poems that collectively describe the life of the fictional small town of Spoon River, named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters' home town. The collection includes two hundred and twelve separate characters, all providing two-hundred forty-four accounts of their lives and losses.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5holds up very well
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Indeholder "Introduction", "The Hill", "Hod Putt", "Ollie McGee", "Fletcher McGee", "Robert Fulton Tanner", "Cassius Hueffer", "Serepta Mason", "Amanda Barker", "Constance Hately", "Chase Henry", "Harry Carey Goodhue", "Judge Somers", "Kinsey Keene", "Benjamin Pantier", "Mrs Benjamin Pantier", "Reuben Pantier", "Emily Sparks", "Trainor, the Druggist", "Daisy Fraser", "Benjamin Fraser", "Minerva Jones", "'Indignation' Jones", "Doctor Meyers", "Mrs Meyers", "'Butch' Weldy", "Knowlt Hoheimer", "Lydia Puckett", "Frank Drummer", "Hare Drummer", "Conrad Siever", "Doc Hill", "Andy the night-watch", "Sarah Brown", "Percy Bysshe Shelley", "Flossie Cabanis", "Julia Miller", "Johnnie Sayre", "Charlie French", "Zenas Witt", "Theodore the Poet", "The Town Marshal", "Jack McGuire", "Dorcas Gustine", "Nicholas Bindle", "Jacob Goodpasture", "Harold Arnett", "Margaret Fuller Slack", "George Trimble", "Dr. Siegfried Iseman", "'Ace' Shaw", "Lois Spear", "Justice Arnett", "Willard Fluke", "Aner Clute", "Lucius Atherton", "Homer Clapp", "Deacon Taylor", "Sam Hookey", "Cooney Potter", "Fiddler Jones", "Nellie Clark", "Louise Smith", "Herbert Marshall", "George Gray", "Hon. Henry Bennett", "Griffy the Cooper", "A. D. Blood", "Robert Southey Burke", "Dora Williams", "Mrs Williams", "William and Emily", "The Circuit Judge", "Blind Jack", "John Horace Burleson", "Nancy Knapp", "Barry Holden", "State's Attorney Fallas", "Wendell P. Bloyd", "Francis Turner", "Franklin Jones", "John M. Church", "Russian Sonia", "Isa Nutter", "Barney Hainsfeather", "Petit, the Poet", "Pauline Barrett", "Mrs. Charles Bliss", "Mrs. George Reece", "Rev. Lemuel Wiley", "Thomas Ross, Jr.", "Rev. Abner Peet", "Jefferson Howard", "Judge Selah Lively", "Albert Schirding", "Jonas Keene", "Eugenia Todd", "Yee Bow", "Washington McNeely", "Paul McNeely", "Mary McNeely", "Daniel M'Cumber", "Georgine Sand Miner", "Thomas Rhodes", "Ida Chicken", "Penniwit, the Artist", "Jim Brown", "Robert Davidson", "Elsa Wertman", "Hamilton Greene", "Ernest Hyde", "Roger Heston", "Amos Sibley", "Mrs. Sibley", "Adam Weirauch", "Ezra Bartlett", "Amelia Garrick", "John Hancock Otis", "Anthony Findlay", "John Cabanis", "The Unknown", "Alexander Throckmorton", "Jonathan Swift Somers (Author of the Spooniad)", "Widow McFarlane", "Carl Hamblin", "Editor Whedon", "Eugene Carman", "Clarence Fawcett", "W. Lloyd Garrison Standard", "Professor Newcomer", "Ralph Rhodes", "Mickey M'Grew", "Rosie Roberts", "Oscar Hummel", "Roscoe Purkapile", "Mrs Purkapile", "Josiah Tompkins", "Mrs. Kessler", "Harmon Whitney", "Bert Kessler", "Lambert Hutchins", "Lillian Stewart", "Hortense Robbins", "Batterton Dobyns", "Jacob Godbey", "Tom Beatty", "Roy Butler", "Searcy Foote", "Edmund Pollard", "Thomas Trevelyan", "Percival Sharp", "Hiram Scates", "Peleg Poague", "Jeduthan Hawley", "Abel Melveny", "Oaks Tutt", "Elliott Hawkins", "Voltaire Johnson", "English Thornton", "Enoch Dunlap", "Ida Frickey", "Seth Compton", "Felix Schmidt", "Shrœder the Fisherman", "Richard Bone", "Silas Dement", "Dillard Sissman", "Jonathan Houghton", "E C Culbertson", "Shack Dye", "Hildrup Tubbs", "Henry Tripp", "Granville Calhoun", "Henry C Calhoun", "Alfred Moir", "Dippold the Optician", "Magrady Graham", "Archibald Higbie", "Tom Merritt", "Mrs. Merritt", "Elmer Karr", "Elizabeth Childers", "Edith Conant", "Charles Webster", "Father Malloy", "Ami Green", "Calvin Campbell", "Henry Layton", "Harlan Sewall", "Ippolit Konovaloff", "Henry Phipps", "Harry Wilmans", "John Wasson", "Many Soldiers", "Godwin James", "Lyman King", "Caroline Branson", "Anne Rutledge", "Hamlet Micure", "Mabel Osborne", "William H. Herndon", "Rebecca Wasson", "Rutherford McDowell", "Hannah Armstrong", "Lucinda Matlock", "Davis Matlock", "Herman Altman", "Jennie M'Grew", "Columbus Cheney", "Wallace Ferguson", "Marie Bateson", "Tennessee Claflin Shope", "Plymouth Rock Joe", "Imanuel Ehrenhardt", "Samuel Gardner", "Dow Kritt", "William Jones", "William Goode", "J. Milton Miles", "Faith Matheny", "Scholfield Huxley", "Willie Metcalf", "Willie Pennington", "The Village Atheist", "John Ballard", "Julian Scott", "Alfonso Churchill", "Zilpha Marsh", "James Garber", "Lydia Humphrey", "Le Roy Goldman", "Gustav Richter", "Arlo Will", "Captain Orlando Killion", "Jeremy Carlisle", "Joseph Dixon", "Judson Stoddard", "Russell Kincaid", "Aaron Hatfield", "Isaiah Beethoven", "Elijah Browning", "Webster Ford", "The Spooniad".De handler alle om livet og døden i en lille by. Mange hemmeligheder kommer frem og ikke alle er lige artige.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An amazing collection of poems, ostensibly the voices of the dead in Spoon River cemetery. Each person has something to say about his or her life, and as you read, you find the poems interlacing and telling more of a story than any of the poems can tell singly. I've loved this collection for years.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5"You two have seen the secret together,He sees it in you, and you in him.And there you sit thrilling lest the MysteryStand before you and strike you deadWith a splendor like the sun's..." (from "Faith Matheny")
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I read this after seeing the play version and absolutely fell in love with Masters stories.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a conceptually intriguing book in which the residents (represented by over 200 poems) of a small town cemetery speak from the grave about the truth as they see it, being free from social pressure or potential retribution to present themselves or others in a good light.I think it's important to remember that Masters was a lawyer by profession, a person who had heard people's testimonies about incidents and different people and had seen how judges and juries dealt with them. This book isn't simply about a small town, it's about humanity and justice, sometimes in the legal sense and sometimes in the larger sense. It's also about how people perceive themselves and others. We get more than one perspective on different characters or events that come up as the individuals speak.This is a book-length work that was written in sections that appeared serially before being collected into a single volume. As many people note, the poems at the beginning of the book are almost unremittingly depressing. They're largely about people who experienced injustice or floundered in the face of events they couldn't control. This lets up in the last third of the book, though not necessarily to good effect. I felt that Masters continued the project after it's vital energy had waned.Women may be a little dissatisfied with the book because so few women are represented, 50 out of 244, and often in stereotypical ways. This isn't surprising considering that most of these poems appeared before women had even been granted the right to vote. Though the lack of representation is still a disappointment, it's worth acknowledging that he did give women a voice and laid bare some injustices toward them and community attitudes toward stereotypes represented that were unjust. He doesn't let things be simple.The copy I read had a had an introduction by John Hollander and footnotes clarifying the many historical and literary allusions in the poems. I highly recommend people get a volume with the footnotes.Much has been written about this work. In fact, it's the only book of poetry I've ever heard of that has its own website (spoonriveranthology.net), essentially a fan site. It's worth reading and rereading. By the end, I the many people/poems had become a blur and I'm not able to say which were my favorites. The next time through I'll mark them. And there will definitely be a next time through. Not all of the poems were great but many of them were superb and I'd like to find them again.I don't think this book is for everyone but it struck me as a good book to have students read and discuss at the high school level because if offers so much to talk about, whether matters of poetics or history or justice. I intend to give a copy to my brother, who is a lawyer and would appreciate the many perspectives that turn up in the book. I also think any serious student of poetry should read it as an example of a big project. In our formal education, we so rarely presented with even remotely contemporary examples of book-length poems or projects. I was quite miffed to be left clueless about this book until running into it at my local library.I want to warn the readers of this review that Spoon River Anthology is generally considered the only work of Masters worth preserving. As John Hollander put it, a "quite uninspired poet, who in the unique format, and under imaginative pressures, excelled himself by producing a masterpiece." His other poetry is very conventional rhymed verse and only in throwing off convention in middle age was he able to speak in a variety of voices and from a variety of perspectives to produce this fascinating work.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The edition I have of this book was published in 1915 shortly after the poems were serialized in" Reedy's Mirror".The book begins with the poem "The Hill" which introduces the reader to the town cemetery. The residents of the cemetery tell the tale of their lives in remainder of the poems. The author does a good job of telling a short story in two or three paragraphs of verse. There are separate stories from a husband and wife, members of a family or different people involved in the failure of a bank. There is a mixture of humor and tragedy as thethe history of the town unfolds.Towards the end of the book the author runs out of "A" material and I did not care for the last poem "The Spooniad" a nine page contribution attributed to a town resident. All in all it is an entertaining book for the short time it takes to read.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Some of the writing, albeit morbid, is downright delicious. Best taken in small doses, however. He beats the theme like a dead horse. I pride myself on a high tolerance for grief and morbidity, and I could only make it halfway through. Not surprising that James Franco made a contest of adapting it into a short film. There are about eight minutes' worth of gripping, compelling, poetry in this book. Save the rest for when you're feeling Poe-ish, or have just gone through a break-up and want to read about a caste of characters who are all worse off than you.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Masters weaves a great story between the main characters of these short poems. The over-arching theme, of course, if the irony of "the good life" and "death as the great equalizer," but some of the poems are especially powerful. The inspiration for "Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson, many say.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Astonishing! Wonderful!
Book preview
Spoon River Anthology - Edgar Lee Masters
Spoon River Anthology
By Edgar Lee Masters
Start Publishing LLC
Copyright © 2012 by Start Publishing LLC
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
First Start Publishing eBook edition October 2012
Start Publishing is a registered trademark of Start Publishing LLC
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-1-62558-557-8
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 other 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,
Of the cross-current in life
Which Bring honor to the dead, who lived in shame.
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.
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
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?
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