Flossie Cabanis

    From Bindle's opera house in the village
    To Broadway is a great step.
    But I tried to take it, my ambition fired
    When sixteen years of age,
    Seeing "East Lynne," played here in the village
    By Ralph Barrett, the coming
    Romantic actor, who enthralled my soul.
    True, I trailed back home, a broken failure,
    When Ralph disappeared in New York,
    Leaving me alone in the city -
    But life broke him also.
    In all this place of silence
    There are no kindred spirits.
    How I wish Duse could stand amid the pathos
    Of these quiet fields
    And read these words.

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

The Verdict

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

Alma Bell To The Coroner

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

William Jones

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

Le Roy Goldman

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

English

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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

Fiddler Jones

    The earth keeps some vibration going
    There in your heart, and that is you.
    And if the people find you can fiddle,
    Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
    What do you see, a harvest of clover?
    Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
    The wind's in the corn; you rub your hands
    For beeves hereafter ready for market;
    Or else you hear the rustle of skirts
    Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.
    To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust
    Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;
    They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
    Stepping it off, to "Toor-a-Loor."
    How could I till my forty acres
    Not to speak of getting more,
    With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
    Stirred in my brain by crows and robi...

Edgar Lee Masters

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 ...

Edgar Lee Masters

Daniel M'Cumber

    When I went to the city, Mary McNeely,
    I meant to return for you, yes I did.
    But Laura, my landlady's daughter,
    Stole into my life somehow, and won me away.
    Then after some years whom should I meet
    But Georgine Miner from Niles - a sprout
    Of the free love, Fourierist gardens that flourished
    Before the war all over Ohio.
    Her dilettante lover had tired of her,
    And she turned to me for strength and solace.
    She was some kind of a crying thing
    One takes in one's arms, and all at once
    It slimes your face with its running nose,
    And voids its essence all over you;
    Then bites your hand and springs away.
    And there you stand bleeding and smelling to heaven
    Why, Mary McNeely, I was not worthy
    To ...

Edgar Lee Masters

For A Dance

    There is in the dance
        The joy of children on a May day lawn.
    The fragments of old dreams and dead romance
        Come to us from the dancers who are gone.

    What strains of ancient blood
        Move quicker to the music's passionate beat?
    I see the gulls fly over a shadowy flood
        And Munster fields of barley and of wheat.

    And I see sunny France,
        And the vine's tendrils quivering to the light,
    And faces, faces, yearning for the dance
        With wistful eyes that look on our delight.

    They live through us again
        And we through them, who wish for lips and eyes
    Wherewith to feel, not fancy, the old pain
        Passed with reluctance through the centuries

    To us, who in the m...

Edgar Lee Masters

Pauline Barrett

    Almost the shell of a woman after the surgeon's knife
    And almost a year to creep back into strength,
    Till the dawn of our wedding decennial
    Found me my seeming self again.
    We walked the forest together,
    By a path of soundless moss and turf.
    But I could not look in your eyes,
    And you could not look in my eyes,
    For such sorrow was ours - the beginning of gray in your hair.
    And I but a shell of myself.
    And what did we talk of? - sky and water,
    Anything, 'most, to hide our thoughts.
    And then your gift of wild roses,
    Set on the table to grace our dinner.
    Poor heart, how bravely you struggled
    To imagine and live a remembered rapture!
    Then my spirit drooped as the night came on,
    And you left...

Edgar Lee Masters