1

I would have rid the earth of him
Once, in my pride! . .

I never knew the worth of him
Until he died.

THE DARK HILLS

Dark hills at evening in the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors under ground,
Far now from all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade as if the last of days

Were fading, and all wars were done.

✓ RICHARD CORY 1

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he
walked.

And he was rich-yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons, from The Children of the Night.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the
bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar Lee Masters was born at Garnett, Kansas, August 23, 1869, of old Puritan and pioneering stock. When he was still a boy, the family moved to Illinois, where, after desultory schooling, he studied law in his father's office at Lewiston. For a year he practised with his father and then went to Chicago, where he became a successful and prominent attorney. Before going to Chicago, Masters had composed a great quantity of verse in traditional forms on still more traditional themes; by the time he was twenty-four he had written about four hundred poems, revealing the result of wide reading and betraying the influence of Poe, Keats, Shelley and Swinburne. His work, previous to the publication of Spoon River Anthology, was derivative and undistinguished.

Taking as his model The Greek Anthology, which his friend William Marion Reedy had pressed upon him, in 1914 Masters evolved Spoon River Anthology, that astonishing assemblage of over two hundred self-inscribed epitaphs, in which the dead of a middle Western town are supposed to have written the truth about themselves. Through these frank revelations, many of them interrelated, the village is recreated for us; it lives again, unvarnished and typical, with all its intrigues, hypocrisies, feuds, martyrdoms and occasional exaltations. The monotony of existence in a drab township, the defeat of ideals, the struggle toward higher goals-all is synthesized in these crowded pages. All moods and all manner of voices are heard here-even Masters's, who explains the reason for his medium and the selection of his form through "Petit, the Poet."

Starved Rock (1919), Domesday Book (1920) and The Open Sea (1921) are, like all Masters's later books, queerly assembled mixtures of good, bad and derivative verse. And yet, for all of this poet's borrowings, in spite of his cynicism and disillusion,

Masters's work is a continual searching for some key to the mystery of truth, the mastery of life.

PETIT, THE POET1

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!

1

LUCINDA MATLOCK1

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,

Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan Company, from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.

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.

✓ ANNE RUTLEDGE *1

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,

*See pages 54, 78, 139, 142, 172.

1

Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan Company, from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.

But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane, whose literary career was one of the most meteoric in American letters, was born at Newark, New Jersey, November 1, 1871. After taking a partial course at Lafayette College, he entered journalism at sixteen and, until the time of his death, was a reporter and writer of newspaper sketches. When he died, at the age of thirty, he had produced ten printed volumes (one of which, The Red Badge of Courage, is a classic among descriptive novels), two more announced for publication and two others which were appearing serially.

At various periods in Crane's brief career, he experimented in verse, seeking to find new effects in unrhymed lines for his acuteness of vision. The results were embodied in two volumes of unusual poetry, The Black Riders (1895) and War Is Kind (1899); lines that anticipated the Imagists and the epigrammatic free verse that followed fifteen years later. It is more than probable that his feverish energy of production aggravated the illness that caused Crane's death. He reached his refuge in the Black Forest only to die at the journey's end, June 5, 1900.

I SAW A MAN

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed at this;

I accosted the man.
"It is futile," I said,
"You can never"-

"You lie," he cried,

And ran on.