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.

Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar Lee Masters was an American poet, biographer, and dramatist. Born in Kansas and raised in Illinois, Masters is best known for his collection of poems entitled "Spoon River Anthology" (1915), which is a series of epitaphs of residents of the fictional small town of Spoon River. His works reflect the everyday lives and frustrations of middle America. Masters also practiced law and wrote biographies for historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain.

Edgar Lee Masters

Rev. Percy Ferguson

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

The Door

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

Elizabeth Childers

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

Botanical Gardens

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

English

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Walter Simmons

    My parents thought that I would be
    As great as Edison or greater:
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Edgar Lee Masters

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 - l 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.

Edgar Lee Masters

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, ...

Edgar Lee Masters

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.
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Edgar Lee Masters

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 deat...

Edgar Lee Masters

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!

Edgar Lee Masters