Epitaphs

I have an old paperback copy of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915) which I like to read bits from every now and again. It's a fascinating collection of short poems, all stories of the dead and gone citizens of Spoon River, delivered in their own voices. It offers an intriguing take on perspective; the dead tell the truth about their lives, but what they focus on in the short monologues allowed them is not always what you might expect. Some people have secrets which died with them, and are now revealed -- but only to the reader, not to the other inhabitants of Spoon River. It's a melancholy experience reading them one after another, but very worth doing. It makes me start to wonder: what I would say if allowed one short page to sum up my life; what would matter to someone no longer of this world? It's an endlessly attractive book, shown by the many permutations it has seen -- it's become a stage play, a radio adaptation, and inspired many songs, including a multimedia cantata (which you can hear excerpts of on the composer's website).

Here are a few examples:


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.


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.


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.