Read Spoon River Anthology Page 4


  But I poisoned my benefactions

  With constant reminders of their dependence.

  CHASE HENRY

  IN life I was the town drunkard;

  When I died the priest denied me burial

  In holy ground.

  The which redounded to my good fortune.

  For the Protestants bought this lot,

  And buried my body here,

  Close to the grave of the banker Nicholas,

  And of his wife Priscilla.

  Take note, ye prudent and pious souls,

  Of the cross-currents in life

  Which bring honor to the dead, who lived in shame.

  HARRY CAREY GOODHUE

  YOU never marveled, dullards of Spoon River,

  When Chase Henry voted against the saloons

  To revenge himself for being shut off.

  But none of you was keen enough

  To follow my steps, or trace me home

  As Chase’s spiritual brother.

  Do you remember when I fought

  The bank and the courthouse ring,

  For pocketing the interest on public funds?

  And when I fought our leading citizens

  For making the poor the pack-horses of the taxes?

  And when I fought the water works

  For stealing streets and raising rates?

  And when I fought the business men

  Who fought me in these fights?

  Then do you remember:

  That staggering up from the wreck of defeat,

  And the wreck of a ruined career,

  I slipped from my cloak my last ideal,

  Hidden from all eyes until then,

  Like the cherished jawbone of an ass,

  And smote the bank and the water works,

  And the business men with prohibition,

  And made Spoon River pay the cost

  Of the fights that I had lost.

  JUDGE SOMERS

  HOW does it happen, tell me,

  That I who was most erudite of lawyers,

  Who knew Blackstone and Coke*

  Almost by heart, who made the greatest speech

  The court-house ever heard, and wrote

  A brief that won the praise of Justice Breese—

  How does it happen, tell me,

  That I lie here unmarked, forgotten,

  While Chase Henry, the town drunkard,

  Has a marble block, topped by an urn,

  Wherein Nature, in a mood ironical,

  Has sown a flowering weed?

  KINSEY KEENE

  YOUR attention, Thomas Rhodes, president of the bank;

  Coolbaugh Whedon, editor of the Argus;

  Rev. Peet, pastor of the leading church;

  A. D. Blood, several times Mayor of Spoon River;

  And finally all of you, members of the Social Purity Club—

  Your attention to Cambronne’s dying words,*

  Standing with the heroic remnant

  Of Napoleon’s guard on Mount Saint Jean

  At the battle field of Waterloo,

  When Maitland, the Englishman, called to them:

  “Surrender, brave Frenchmen!”—

  There at close of day with the battle hopelessly lost,

  And hordes of men no longer the army

  Of the great Napoleon

  Streamed from the field like ragged strips

  Of thunder clouds in the storm.

  Well, what Cambronne said to Maitland

  Ere the English fire made smooth the brow of the hill

  Against the sinking light of day

  Say I to you, and all of you,

  And to you, O world.

  And I charge you to carve it

  Upon my stone.

  BENJAMIN PANTIER

  TOGETHER in this grave lie Benjamin Pantier, attorney at law,

  And Nig, his dog, constant companion, solace and friend.

  Down the gray road, friends, children, men and women,

  Passing one by one out of life, left me till I was alone

  With Nig for partner, bed-fellow, comrade in drink.

  In the morning of life I knew aspiration and saw glory.

  Then she, who survives me, snared my soul

  With a snare which bled me to death,

  Till I, once strong of will, lay broken, indifferent,

  Living with Nig in a room back of a dingy office.

  Under my jaw-bone is snuggled the bony nose of Nig—

  Our story is lost in silence. Go by, mad world!

  MRS. BENJAMIN PANTIER

  I KNOW that he told that I snared his soul

  With a snare which bled him to death.

  And all the men loved him,

  And most of the women pitied him.

  But suppose you are really a lady, and have delicate tastes,

  And loathe the smell of whiskey and onions.

  And the rhythm of Wordsworth’s “Ode” runs in your ears,

  While he goes about from morning till night

  Repeating bits of that common thing;

  “Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?”

  And then, suppose:

  You are a woman well endowed,

  And the only man with whom the law and morality

  Permit you to have the marital relation

  Is the very man that fills you with disgust

  Every time you think of it—while you think of it

  Every time you see him?

  That’s why I drove him away from home

  To live with his dog in a dingy room

  Back of his office.

  REUBEN PANTIER

  WELL, Emily Sparks, your prayers were not wasted,

  Your love was not all in vain.

  I owe whatever I was in life

  To your hope that would not give me up,

  To your love that saw me still as good.

  Dear Emily Sparks, let me tell you the story.

  I pass the effect of my father and mother;

  The milliner’s daughter made me trouble

  And out I went in the world,

  Where I passed through every peril known

  Of wine and women and joy of life.

  One night, in a room in the Rue de Rivoli,

  I was drinking wine with a black-eyed cocotte,

  And the tears swam into my eyes.

  She thought they were amorous tears and smiled

  For thought of her conquest over me.

  But my soul was three thousand miles away,

  In the days when you taught me in Spoon River.

  And just because you no more could love me,

  Nor pray for me, nor write me letters,

  The eternal silence of you spoke instead.

  And the black-eyed cocotte took the tears for hers,

  As well as the deceiving kisses I gave her.

  Somehow, from that hour, I had a new vision—

  Dear Emily Sparks!

  EMILY SPARKS

  WHERE is my boy, my boy—

  In what far part of the world?

  The boy I loved best of all in the school?—

  I, the teacher, the old maid, the virgin heart,

  Who made them all my children.

  Did I know my boy aright,

  Thinking of him as spirit aflame,

  Active, ever aspiring?

  Oh, boy, boy, for whom I prayed and prayed

  In many a watchful hour at night,

  Do you remember the letter I wrote you

  Of the beautiful love of Christ?

  And whether you ever took it or not,

  My boy, wherever you are,

  Work for your soul’s sake,

  That all the clay of you, all of the dross of you,

  May yield to the fire of you,

  Till the fire is nothing but light! . . .

  Nothing but light!

  TRAINOR, THE DRUGGIST

  ONLY the chemist can tell, and not always the che
mist,

  What will result from compounding

  Fluids or solids.

  And who can tell

  How men and women will interact

  On each other, or what children will result?

  There were Benjamin Pantier and his wife,

  Good in themselves, but evil toward each other:

  He oxygen, she hydrogen,

  Their son, a devastating fire.

  I Trainor, the druggist, a mixer of chemicals,

  Killed while making an experiment,

  Lived unwedded.

  DAISY FRASER

  DID you ever hear of Editor Whedon

  Giving to the public treasury any of the money he received

  For supporting candidates for office?

  Or for writing up the canning factory

  To get people to invest?

  Or for suppressing the facts about the bank,

  When it was rotten and ready to break?

  Did you ever hear of the Circuit Judge

  Helping anyone except the "Q” railroad,*

  Or the bankers? Or did Rev. Peet or Rev. Sibley

  Give any part of their salary, earned by keeping still,

  Or speaking out as the leaders wished them to do,

  To the building of the water works?

  But I—Daisy Fraser who always passed

  Along the streets through rows of nods and smiles,

  And coughs and words such as “there she goes,”

  Never was taken before Justice Arnett

  Without contributing ten dollars and costs

  To the school fund of Spoon River!

  BENJAMIN FRASER

  THEIR spirits beat upon mine

  Like the wings of a thousand butterflies.

  I closed my eyes and felt their spirits vibrating.

  I closed my eyes, yet I knew when their lashes

  Fringed their cheeks from downcast eyes,

  And when they turned their heads;

  And when their garments clung to them,

  Or fell from them, in exquisite draperies.

  Their spirits watched my ecstasy

  With wide looks of starry unconcern.

  Their spirits looked upon my torture;

  They drank it as it were the water of life;

  With reddened cheeks, brightened eyes

  The rising flame of my soul made their spirits gilt,

  Like the wings of a butterfly drifting suddenly into sunlight.

  And they cried to me for life, life, life.

  But in taking life for myself,

  In seizing and crushing their souls,

  As a child crushes grapes and drinks

  From its palms the purple juice,

  I came to this wingless void,

  Where neither red, nor gold, nor wine,

  Nor the rhythm of life is known.

  MINERVA JONES

  I AM Minerva, the village poetess,

  Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street

  For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,

  And all the more when “Butch” Weldy*

  Captured me after a brutal hunt.

  He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;

  And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,

  Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice.

  Will some one go to the village newspaper,

  And gather into a book the verses I wrote?—

  I thirsted so for love!

  I hungered so for life!

  “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 death.

  So I crept, crept, like a snail through the days

  Of my life.

  No more you hear my footsteps in the morning,

  Resounding on the hollow sidewalk,

  Going to the grocery store for a little corn meal

  And a nickel’s worth of bacon.

  DOCTOR MEYERS

  NO other man, unless it was Doc Hill,

  Did more for people in this town than I.

  And all the weak, the halt, the improvident

  And those who could not pay flocked to me.

  I was good-hearted, easy Doctor Meyers.

  I was healthy, happy, in comfortable fortune,

  Blessed with a congenial mate, my children raised,

  All wedded, doing well in the world.

  And then one night, Minerva, the poetess,

  Came to me in her trouble, crying.

  I tried to help her out—she died—

  They indicted me, the newspapers disgraced me,

  My wife perished of a broken heart.

  And pneumonia finished me.

  MRS. MEYERS*

  HE protested all his life long

  The newspapers lied about him villainously;

  That he was not at fault for Minerva’s fall,

  But only tried to help her.

  Poor soul so sunk in sin he could not see

  That even trying to help her, as he called it,

  He had broken the law human and divine.

  Passers by, an ancient admonition to you:

  If your ways would be ways of pleasantness,

  And all your pathways peace,

  Love God and keep his commandments.

  "BUTCH” WELDY

  AFTER I got religion and steadied down

  They gave me a job in the canning works,

  And every morning I had to fill

  The tank in the yard with gasoline,

  That fed the blow-fires in the sheds

  To heat the soldering irons.

  And I mounted a rickety ladder to do it,

  Carrying buckets full of the stuff.

  One morning, as I stood there pouring,

  The air grew still and seemed to heave,

  And I shot up as the tank exploded,

  And down I came with both legs broken,

  And my eyes burned crisp as a couple of eggs.

  For someone left a blow-fire going,

  And something sucked the flame in the tank.

  The Circuit Judge said whoever did it

  Was a fellow-servant of mine, and so

  Old Rhodes’ son didn’t have to pay me.

  And I sat on the witness stand as blind

  As Jack the Fiddler, saying over and over,

  “I didn’t know him at all.”

  KNOWLT HOHEIMER

  I WAS the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.*

  When I felt the bullet enter my heart

  I wished I had staid at home and gone to jail

  For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,

  Instead of running away and joining the army.

  Rather a thousand times the county jail

  Than to lie under this marble figure with wings,

  And this granite pedestal

  Bearing the words, “Pro Patria.”*

  What do they mean, anyway?

  LYDIA PUCKETT

  KNOWLT HOHEIMER ran away to the war

  The day before Curl Trenary

  Swore out a warrant through Justice Arnett
r />
  For stealing hogs.

  But that’s not the reason he turned a soldier.

  He caught me running with Lucius Atherton.

  We quarreled and I told him never again

  To cross my path.

  Then he stole the hogs and went to the war—

  Back of every soldier is a woman.

  FRANK DRUMMER

  OUT of a cell into this darkened space—

  The end at twenty-five!

  My tongue could not speak what stirred within me,

  And the village thought me a fool.

  Yet at the start there was a clear vision,

  A high and urgent purpose in my soul

  Which drove me on trying to memorize

  The Encyclopædia Britannica!

  HARE DRUMMER

  Do the boys and girls still go to Siever’s

  For cider, after school, in late September?

  Or gather hazel nuts among the thickets

  On Aaron Hatfield’s farm when the frosts begin?

  For many times with the laughing girls and boys

  Played I along the road and over the hills

  When the sun was low and the air was cool,

  Stopping to club the walnut tree

  Standing leafless against a flaming west.

  Now, the smell of the autumn smoke,

  And the dropping acorns,

  And the echoes about the vales

  Bring dreams of life. They hover over me.

  They question me:

  Where are those laughing comrades?

  How many are with me, how many

  In the old orchards along the way to Siever’s,

  And in the woods that overlook

  The quiet water?

  CONRAD SIEVER

  NOT in that wasted garden

  Where bodies are drawn into grass

  That feeds no flocks, and into evergreens

  That bear no fruit—

  There where along the shaded walks

  Vain sighs are heard,

  And vainer dreams are dreamed

  Of close communion with departed souls—

  But here under the apple tree