Gustav Richter

    After a long day of work in my hot - houses
    Sleep was sweet, but if you sleep on your left side
    Your dreams may be abruptly ended.
    I was among my flowers where some one
    Seemed to be raising them on trial,
    As if after-while to be transplanted
    To a larger garden of freer air.
    And I was disembodied vision
    Amid a light, as it were the sun
    Had floated in and touched the roof of glass
    Like a toy balloon and softly bursted,
    And etherealized in golden air.
    And all was silence, except the splendor
    Was immanent with thought as clear
    As a speaking voice, and I, as thought,
    Could hear a
    Presence think as he walked
    Between the boxes pinching off leaves,
    Looking for bugs and noting values,
    With an eye that saw it all:
    "Homer, oh yes! Pericles, good.
    Caesar Borgia, what shall be done with it?
    Dante, too much manure, perhaps.
    Napoleon, leave him awhile as yet.
    Shelley, more soil.    Shakespeare, needs spraying - "
    Clouds, eh! -

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

Willie Pennington

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

The Landscape

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

Nellie Clark

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

Griffy the Cooper

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

English

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The Vision

    Of that dear vale where you and I have lain
    Scanning the mysteries of life and death
    I dreamed, though how impassable the space
    Of time between the present and the past!
    This was the vision that possessed my mind;
    I thought the weird and gusty days of March
    Had eased themselves in melody and peace.
    Pale lights, swift shadows, lucent stalks, clear streams,
    Cool, rosy eves behind the penciled mesh
    Of hazel thickets, and the huge feathered boughs
    Of walnut trees stretched singing to the blast;
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    The cautioned twitterings of hidden birds;
    The flight of geese among the scattered clouds;
    Night's weeping stars and all the pageantries
    Of awakened life had blossomed i...

Edgar Lee Masters

William Marion Reedy

    He sits before you silent as Buddha,
    And then you say
    This man is Rabelais.
    And while you wonder what his stock is,
    English or Irish, you behold his eyes
    As big and brown as those desirable crockies
    With which as boys we used to play.
    And then you see the spherical light that lies
    Just under the iris coloring,
    Before which everything,
    Becomes as plain as day.

    If you have noticed the rolling jowls
    And the face that speaks its chief
    Delight in beer and roast beef
    Before you have seen his eyes, you see
    A man of fleshly jollity,
    Like the friars of old in gowns and cowls
    To make a show of scowls.
    And when he speaks from an orotund depth that growls
    In a humorous way...

Edgar Lee Masters

Isaiah Beethoven

    They told me I had three months to live,
    So I crept to Bernadotte,
    And sat by the mill for hours and hours
    Where the gathered waters deeply moving
    Seemed not to move:
    O world, that's you!
    You are but a widened place in the river
    Where Life looks down and we rejoice for her
    Mirrored in us, and so we dream And turn away, but when again
    We look for the face, behold the low-lands
    And blasted cotton-wood trees where we empty
    Into the larger stream!
    But here by the mill the castled clouds
    Mocked themselves in the dizzy water;
    And over its agate floor at night
    The flame of the moon ran under my eyes
    Amid a forest stillness broken
    By a flute in a hut on the hill.
    At last when I came ...

Edgar Lee Masters

Caroline Branson

    With our hearts like drifting suns, had we but walked,
    As often before, the April fields till star - light
    Silkened over with viewless gauze the darkness
    Under the cliff, our trysting place in the wood,
    Where the brook turns! Had we but passed from wooing
    Like notes of music that run together, into winning,
    In the inspired improvisation of love!
    But to put back of us as a canticle ended
    The rapt enchantment of the flesh,
    In which our souls swooned, down, down,
    Where time was not, nor space, nor ourselves -
    Annihilated in love!
    To leave these behind for a room with lamps:
    And to stand with our Secret mocking itself,
    And hiding itself amid flowers and mandolins,
    Stared at by all between salad and coffee....

Edgar Lee Masters

William H. Herndon

    There by the window in the old house
    Perched on the bluff, overlooking miles of valley,
    My days of labor closed, sitting out life's decline,
    Day by day did I look in my memory,
    As one who gazes in an enchantress' crystal globe,
    And I saw the figures of the past
    As if in a pageant glassed by a shining dream,
    Move through the incredible sphere of time.
    And I saw a man arise from the soil like a fabled giant
    And throw himself over a deathless destiny,
    Master of great armies, head of the republic,
    Bringing together into a dithyramb of recreative song
    The epic hopes of a people;
    At the same time Vulcan of sovereign fires,
    Where imperishable shields and swords were beaten out
    From spirits tempered in heaven....

Edgar Lee Masters

An Antique.

Mildewed and gray the marble stairs
Rise from their balustraded urns
To where a chiseled satyr glares
From a luxuriant bed of ferns;

A pebbled walk that labyrinths
'Twixt parallels of verdant box
To where, broad-based on grotesque plinths,
'Mid cushions of moss-padded rocks,

Rises a ruined pleasure-house,
Of shattered column, broken dome,
Where, reveling in thick carouse,
The buoyant ivy makes its home.

And here from bank, and there from bed,
Down the mad rillet's jubilant lymph,
The lavish violet's odors shed
In breathings of a fountain nymph.

And where, in lichened hoariness,
The broken marble dial-plate
Basks in the Summer's sultriness,
Rich houri roses palpitate.

Voluptuous, languid with perfumes,
As w...

Madison Julius Cawein