Lillian Stewart

    I was the daughter of Lambert Hutchins,
    Born in a cottage near the grist - mill,
    Reared in the mansion there on the hill,
    With its spires, bay - windows, and roof of slate.
    How proud my mother was of the mansion
    How proud of father's rise in the world!
    And how my father loved and watched us,
    And guarded our happiness.
    But I believe the house was a curse,
    For father's fortune was little beside it;
    And when my husband found he had married
    A girl who was really poor,
    He taunted me with the spires,
    And called the house a fraud on the world,
    A treacherous lure to young men, raising hopes
    Of a dowry not to be had;
    And a man while selling his vote
    Should get enough from the people's betrayal
    To wall the whole of his family in.
    He vexed my life till I went back home
    And lived like an old maid till I died,
    Keeping house for father.

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

Silas Dement

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

Josiah Tompkins

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

Amanda Barker

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

Anne Rutledge

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 -
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Edgar Lee Masters

Lambert Hutchins

    I have two monuments besides this granite obelisk:
    One, the house I built on the hill,
    With its spires, bay windows, and roof of slate.
    The other, the lake-front in Chicago,
    Where the railroad keeps a switching yard,
    With whistling engines and crunching wheels
    And smoke and soot thrown over the city,
    And the crash of cars along the boulevard, -
    A blot like a hog-pen on the harbor
    Of a great metropolis, foul as a sty.
    I helped to give this heritage
    To generations yet unborn, with my vote
    In the House of Representatives,
    And the lure of the thing was to be at rest
    From the never - ending fright of need,
    And to give my daughters gentle breeding,
    And a sense of security in life.
    But, you ...

Edgar Lee Masters

Searcy Foote

    I wanted to go away to college
    But rich Aunt Persis wouldn't help me.
    So I made gardens and raked the lawns
    And bought John Alden's books with my earnings
    And toiled for the very means of life.
    I wanted to marry Delia Prickett,
    But how could I do it with what I earned?
    And there was Aunt Persis more than seventy
    Who sat in a wheel-chair half alive
    With her throat so paralyzed, when she swallowed
    The soup ran out of her mouth like a duck -
    A gourmand yet, investing her income
    In mortgages, fretting all the time
    About her notes and rents and papers.
    That day I was sawing wood for her,
    And reading Proudhon in between.
    I went in the house for a drink of water,
    And there she sat asleep in ...

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

Mrs. Williams

    I was the milliner
    Talked about, lied about,
    Mother of Dora,
    Whose strange disappearance
    Was charged to her rearing.
    My eye quick to beauty
    Saw much beside ribbons
    And buckles and feathers
    And leghorns and felts,
    To set off sweet faces,
    And dark hair and gold.
    One thing I will tell you
    And one I will ask:
    The stealers of husbands
    Wear powder and trinkets,
    And fashionable hats.
    Wives, wear them yourselves.
    Hats may make divorces -
    They also prevent them.
    Well now, let me ask you:
    If all of the children, born here in Spoon River
    Had been reared by the
    County, somewhere on a farm;
    And the fathers and mothers had been given their freed...

Edgar Lee Masters

Josiah Tompkins

    I was well known and much beloved
    And rich, as fortunes are reckoned
    In Spoon River, where I had lived and worked.
    That was the home for me,
    Though all my children had flown afar -
    Which is the way of Nature - all but one.
    The boy, who was the baby, stayed at home,
    To be my help in my failing years
    And the solace of his mother.
    But I grew weaker, as he grew stronger,
    And he quarreled with me about the business,
    And his wife said I was a hindrance to it;
    And he won his mother to see as he did,
    Till they tore me up to be transplanted
    With them to her girlhood home in Missouri.
    And so much of my fortune was gone at last,
    Though I made the will just as he drew it,
    He profited little by it...

Edgar Lee Masters