Portrait Of A Woman

    The pathos in your face is like a peace,
    It is like resignation or a grace
    Which smiles at the surcease
    Of hope. But there is in your face
    The shadow of pain, and there is a trace
    Of memory of pain.

    I look at you again and again,
    And hide my looks lest your quick eye perceives
    My search for your despair.
    I look at your pale hands, I look at your hair;
    And I watch you use your hands, I watch the flare
    Of thought in your eyes like light that interweaves
    A flutter of color running under leaves,
    Such anguished dreams in your eyes!
    And I listen to you speak
    Words like crystals breaking with a tinkle,
    Or a star's twinkle.
    Sometimes as we talk you rise
    And leave the room, and then I rub a streak
    Of a tear from my cheek.

    You tell me such magical things
    Of pictures, books, romance
    And of your life in France
    In the varied music of exquisite words,
    And in a voice that sings.

    All things are memory now with you,
    For poverty girds
    Your hopes, and only your dreams remain.
    And sometimes here and there
    I see as you turn your head a whitened hair,
    Even when you are smiling most.
    And a light comes in your eyes like a passing ghost,
    And a color runs through your cheeks as fresh
    As burns in a girl's flesh.
    Then I can shut my eyes and feel the pain
    That has become a part of you, though I feign
    Laughter myself. One sees another's bruise
    And shakes his thought out of it shuddering.
    So I turn and clamp my will lest I bring
    Your sorrow into my flesh, who cannot choose
    But hear your words and laughter,
    And watch your hands and eyes.

    Then as I think you over after
    I have gone from you, and your face
    Comes to me with its grace
    Of memory of unfound love:
    You seem to me the image of all women
    Who dream and keep under smiles the grief thereof,
    Or sew, or sit by windows, or read books
    To hide their Secret's looks.
    And after a time go out of life and leave
    No uttered words but in their silence grieve
    For Life and for the things no tongue can tell:
    Why Life hurts so, and why Love haunts and hurts
    Poor men and women in this demi-hell.

    Perhaps your pathos means that it is well
    Death in his time the aspiring torch inverts,
    And all tired flesh and haunted eyes and hands
    Moving in painéd whiteness are put under
    The soothing earth to brighten April's wonder.

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

Homer Clapp

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

Willie Pennington

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Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

Archibald Lowell

Edgar Lee Masters, Simple Poetry

English

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Heaven Is But The Hour

Eyes wide for wisdom, calm for joy or pain,
Bright hair alloyed with silver, scarcely gold.
And gracious lips flower pressed like buds to hold
The guarded heart against excess of rain.
Hands spirit tipped through which a genius plays
With paints and clays,
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Clothed in an aura of thought as soundless as a flood
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So is it light in spite of rhythm of blood,
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From Plato's idea stepping, wholly wrought
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Edgar Lee Masters

Samuel Butler Et Al.

Let me consider your emergence
From the milieu of our youth:
We have played all the afternoon, grown hungry.
No meal has been prepared, where have you been?
Toward sun's decline we see you down the path,
And run to meet you, and perhaps you smile,
Or take us in your arms. Perhaps again
You look at us, say nothing, are absorbed,
Or chide us for our dirty frocks or faces.
Of running wild without our meals
You do not speak.

Then in the house, seized with a sudden joy,
After removing gloves and hat, you run,
As with a winged descending flight, and cry,
Half song, half exclamation,
Seize one of us,
Crush one of us with mad embraces, bite
Ears of us in a rapture of affection.
"You shall have supper," then you say.
The stove lids rattle, wood's p...

Edgar Lee Masters

In The Cage

    The sounds of mid-night trickle into the roar
    Of morning over the water growing blue.
    At ten o'clock the August sunbeams pour
    A blinding flood on Michigan Avenue.

    But yet the half-drawn shades of bottle green
    Leave the recesses of the room
    With misty auras drawn around their gloom
    Where things lie undistinguished, scarcely seen.

    You, standing between the window and the bed
    Are edged with rainbow colors. And I lie
    Drowsy with quizzical half-open eye
    Musing upon the contour of your head,
    Watching you comb your hair,
    Clothed in a corset waist and skirt of silk,
    Tied with white braid above your slender hips
    Which reaches to your knees and makes your bare
    And delicate legs by contrast w...

Edgar Lee Masters

Fragment III - Years After

Fade off the ridges, rosy light,
Fade slowly from the last gray height,
And leave no gloomy cloud to grieve
The heart of this enchanted eve!

All things beneath the still sky seem
Bound by the spell of a sweet dream;
In the dusk forest, dreamingly,
Droops slowly down each plumèd head;
The river flowing softly by
Dreams of the sea; the quiet sea
Dreams of the unseen stars; and I
Am dreaming of the dreamless dead.

The river has a silken sheen,
But red rays of the sunset stain
Its pictures, from the steep shore caught,
Till shades of rock, and fern, and tree
Glow like the figures on a pane
Of some old church by twilight seen,
Or like the rich devices wrought
In mediaeval tapestry.

All lonely in a drifting boat
Through shi...

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So We Grew Together

        Reading over your letters I find you wrote me
    "My dear boy," or at times "dear boy," and the envelope
    Said "master" - all as I had been your very son,
    And not the orphan whom you adopted.
    Well, you were father to me! And I can recall
    The things you did for me or gave me:
    One time we rode in a box car to Springfield
    To see the greatest show on earth;
    And one time you gave me redtop boots,
    And one time a watch, and one time a gun.
    Well, I grew to gawkiness with a voice
    Like a rooster trying to crow in August
    Hatched in April, we'll say.
    And you went about wrapped up in silence
    With eyes aflame, and I heard little rumors
    Of what they were doing to you, and how
    They wronged you - and we were p...

Edgar Lee Masters

The Landscape

You and your landscape! There it lies
Stripped, resuming its disguise,
Clothed in dreams, made bare again,
Symbol infinite of pain,
Rapture, magic, mystery
Of vanished days and days to be.
There's its sea of tidal grass
Over which the south winds pass,
And the sun-set's Tuscan gold
Which the distant windows hold
For an instant like a sphere
Bursting ere it disappear.
There's the dark green woods which throve
In the spell of Leese's Grove.
And the winding of the road;
And the hill o'er which the sky
Stretched its pallied vacancy
Ere the dawn or evening glowed.
And the wonder of the town
Somewhere from the hill-top down
Nestling under hills and woods
And the meadow's solitudes.

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Edgar Lee Masters