Read Spoon River Anthology Page 7


  Almost as if an intangible Nemesis* or hatred

  Were marking scores against me,

  But to destroy, and not preserve, my memory.

  I in life was the Circuit Judge, a maker of notches,

  Deciding cases on the points the lawyers scored,

  Not on the right of the matter.

  O wind and rain, leave my head-stone alone!

  For worse than the anger of the wronged,

  The curses of the poor,

  Was to lie speechless, yet with vision clear,

  Seeing that even Hod Putt, the murderer,

  Hanged by my sentence,

  Was innocent in soul compared with me.

  BLIND JACK

  I HAD fiddled all day at the county fair.

  But driving home “Butch” Weldy and Jack McGuire,

  Who were roaring full, made me fiddle and fiddle

  To the song of Susie Skinner, while whipping the horses

  Till they ran away.

  Blind as I was, I tried to get out

  As the carriage fell in the ditch,

  And was caught in the wheels and killed.

  There’s a blind man* here with a brow

  As big and white as a cloud.

  And all we fiddlers, from highest to lowest,

  Writers of music and tellers of stories,

  Sit at his feet,

  And hear him sing of the fall of Troy.*

  JOHN HORACE BURLESON

  I WON the prize essay at school

  Here in the village,

  And published a novel before I was twenty-five.

  I went to the city for themes and to enrich my art;

  There married the banker’s daughter,

  And later became president of the bank—

  Always looking forward to some leisure

  To write an epic novel of the war.

  Meanwhile friend of the great, and lover of letters,

  And host to Matthew Arnold and to Emerson.

  An after dinner speaker, writing essays

  For local clubs. At last brought here—

  My boyhood home, you know—

  Not even a little tablet in Chicago

  To keep my name alive.

  How great it is to write the single line:

  “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll!”*

  NANCY KNAPP

  WELL, don’t you see this was the way of it:

  We bought the farm with what he inherited,

  And his brothers and sisters accused him of poisoning

  His father’s mind against the rest of them.

  And we never had any peace with our treasure.

  The murrain took the cattle, and the crops failed.

  And lightning struck the granary.

  So we mortgaged the farm to keep going.

  And he grew silent and was worried all the time.

  Then some of the neighbors refused to speak to us,

  And took sides with his brothers and sisters.

  And I had no place to turn, as one may say to himself,

  At an earlier time in life; “No matter,

  So and so is my friend, or I can shake this off

  With a little trip to Decatur.”

  Then the dreadfullest smells infested the rooms.

  So I set fire to the beds and the old witch-house

  Went up in a roar of flame,

  As I danced in the yard with waving arms,

  While he wept like a freezing steer.

  BARRY HOLDEN

  THE very fall my sister Nancy Knapp

  Set fire to the house

  They were trying Dr. Duval

  For the murder of Zora Clemens,

  And I sat in the court two weeks

  Listening to every witness.

  It was clear he had got her in a family way;

  And to let the child be born

  Would not do.

  Well, how about me with eight children,

  And one coming, and the farm

  Mortgaged to Thomas Rhodes?

  And when I got home that night,

  (After listening to the story of the buggy ride,

  And the finding of Zora in the ditch,)

  The first thing I saw, right there by the steps,

  Where the boys had hacked for angle worms,

  Was the hatchet!

  And just as I entered there was my wife,

  Standing before me, big with child.

  She started the talk of the mortgaged farm,

  And I killed her.

  STATE’S ATTORNEY FALLAS

  I, THE scourge-wielder, balance-wrecker,

  Smiter with whips and swords;

  I, hater of the breakers of the law;

  I, legalist, inexorable and bitter,

  Driving the jury to hang the madman, Barry Holden,

  Was made as one dead by light too bright for eyes,

  And woke to face a Truth with bloody brow:

  Steel forceps fumbled by a doctor’s hand

  Against my boy’s head as he entered life

  Made him an idiot.

  I turned to books of science

  To care for him.

  That’s how the world of those whose minds are sick

  Became my work in life, and all my world.

  Poor ruined boy! You were, at last, the potter

  And I in all my deeds of charity

  The vessels of your hand.

  WENDELL P. BLOYD

  THEY first charged me with disorderly conduct,

  There being no statute on blasphemy.

  Later they locked me up as insane

  Where I was beaten to death by a Catholic guard.

  My offense was this:

  I said God lied to Adam, and destined him

  To lead the life of a fool,

  Ignorant that there is evil in the world as well as good.

  And when Adam outwitted God by eating the apple

  And saw through the lie,

  God drove him out of Eden to keep him from taking

  The fruit of immortal life.

  For Christ’s sake, you sensible people,

  Here’s what God Himself says about it in the book of Genesis:

  “And the Lord God said, behold the man

  Is become as one of us” (a little envy, you see),

  “To know good and evil” (The all-is-good lie exposed):

  “And now lest he put forth his hand and take

  Also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever:

  Therefore the Lord God sent Him forth from the garden of Eden.”

  (The reason I believe God crucified His Own Son

  To get out of the wretched tangle is, because it sounds just like Him.)

  FRANCIS TURNER

  I COULD not run or play

  In boyhood.

  In manhood I could only sip the cup,

  Not drink—

  For scarlet-fever left my heart diseased.

  Yet I lie here

  Soothed by a secret none but Mary knows:

  There is a garden of acacia,

  Catalpa trees, and arbors sweet with vines—

  There on that afternoon in June

  By Mary’s side—

  Kissing her with my soul upon my lips

  It suddenly took flight.

  FRANKLIN JONES

  IF I could have lived another year

  I could have finished my flying machine,

  And become rich and famous.

  Hence it is fitting the workman

  Who tried to chisel a dove for me

  Made it look more like a chicken.

  For what is it all but being hatched,

  And running about the yard,

  To the day of the block?

  Save that a man has an angel’s brain,

  And sees the ax from the first!

  JOHN M. CHURCH

  I WAS attorney for the "Q”*

  And the Indemnity Company which insured
>
  The owners of the mine.

  I pulled the wires with judge and jury,

  And the upper courts, to beat the claims

  Of the crippled, the widow and orphan,

  And made a fortune thereat.

  The bar association sang my praises

  In a high-flown resolution.

  And the floral tributes were many—

  But the rats devoured my heart

  And a snake made a nest in my skull!

  RUSSIAN SONIA

  I, BORN in Weimar

  Of a mother who was French

  And German father, a most learned professor,

  Orphaned at fourteen years,

  Became a dancer, known as Russian Sonia,

  All up and down the boulevards of Paris,

  Mistress betimes of sundry dukes and counts,

  And later of poor artists and of poets.

  At forty years, passée, I sought New York

  And met old Patrick Hummer on the boat,

  Red-faced and hale, though turned his sixtieth year,

  Returning after having sold a ship-load

  Of cattle in the German city, Hamburg.

  He brought me to Spoon River and we lived here

  For twenty years—they thought that we were married!

  This oak tree near me is the favorite haunt

  Of blue jays chattering, chattering all the day.

  And why not? for my very dust is laughing

  For thinking of the humorous thing called life.

  ISA NUTTER

  Doc MEYERS said I had satyriasis,*

  And Doc Hill called it leucæmia—*

  But I know what brought me here:

  I was sixty-four but strong as a man

  Of thirty-five or forty.

  And it wasn’t writing a letter a day,

  And it wasn’t late hours seven nights a week,

  And it wasn’t the strain of thinking of Minnie,

  And it wasn’t fear or a jealous dread,

  Or the endless task of trying to fathom

  Her wonderful mind, or sympathy

  For the wretched life she led

  With her first and second husband—

  It was none of these that laid me low—

  But the clamor of daughters and threats of sons,

  And the sneers and curses of all my kin

  Right up to the day I sneaked to Peoria

  And married Minnie in spite of them—

  And why do you wonder my will was made

  For the best and purest of women?

  BARNEY HAINSFEATHER

  IF the excursion train to Peoria

  Had just been wrecked, I might have escaped with my life—

  Certainly I should have escaped this place.

  But as it was burned as well, they mistook me

  For John Allen who was sent to the Hebrew Cemetery

  At Chicago,

  And John for me, so I lie here.

  It was bad enough to run a clothing store in this town,

  But to be buried here—ach!

  PETIT, THE POET

  SEEDS in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,

  Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel—

  Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens—

  But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.

  Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,

  Ballades by the score with the same old thought:

  The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;

  And what is love but a rose that fades?

  Life all around me here in the village:

  Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth,

  Courage, constancy, heroism, failure—

  All in the loom, and oh what patterns!

  Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers—

  Blind to all of it all my life long.

  Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,

  Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,

  Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,

  While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?

  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 me alone in my room for a while,

  As you did when I was a bride, poor heart.

  And I looked in the mirror and something said:

  “One should be all dead when one is half-dead—

  Nor ever mock life, nor ever cheat love.”

  And I did it looking there in the mirror—

  Dear, have you ever understood?

  MRS. CHARLES BLISS

  REVEREND WILEY advised me not to divorce him

  For the sake of the children,

  And Judge Somers advised him the same.

  So we stuck to the end of the path.

  But two of the children thought he was right,

  And two of the children thought I was right.

  And the two who sided with him blamed me,

  And the two who sided with me blamed him,

  And they grieved for the one they sided with.

  And all were torn with the guilt of judging,

  And tortured in soul because they could not admire

  Equally him and me.

  Now every gardener knows that plants grown in cellars

  Or under stones are twisted and yellow and weak.

  And no mother would let her baby suck

  Diseased milk from her breast.

  Yet preachers and judges advise the raising of souls

  Where there is no sunlight, but only twilight,

  No warmth, but only dampness and cold—

  Preachers and judges!

  MRS. GEORGE REECE

  TO this generation I would say:

  Memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty.

  It may serve a turn in your life.

  My husband had nothing to do

  With the fall of the bank—he was only cashier.

  The wreck was due to the president, Thomas Rhodes,

  And his vain, unscrupulous son.

  Yet my husband was sent to prison,

  And I was left with the children,

  To feed and clothe and school them.

  And I did it, and sent them forth

  Into the world all clean and strong,

  And all through the wisdom of Pope, the poet:

  “Act well your part, there all the honor lies.”*

  REV. LEMUEL WILEY

  I PREACHED four thousand sermons,

  I conducted forty revivals,

  And baptized many converts.

  Yet no deed of mine

  Shines brighter in the memory of the world,

  And none is treasured more by me:

  Look how I saved the Blisses from divorce,

  And kept the children free from that disgrace,

  To grow up into moral men and women,

  Happy themselves, a credit to the village.

  THOMAS ROSS, JR.

  THIS I saw with my own eyes:

  A cliff-swallow

  Made her nest in a hole of the high clay-bank

  There near Miller’s Ford.

  But no
sooner were the young hatched

  Than a snake crawled up to the nest

  To devour the brood.

  Then the mother swallow with swift flutterings

  And shrill cries

  Fought at the snake,

  Blinding him with the beat of her wings,

  Until he, wriggling and rearing his head,

  Fell backward down the bank

  Into Spoon River and was drowned.

  Scarcely an hour passed

  Until a shrike

  Impaled the mother swallow on a thorn.

  As for myself I overcame my lower nature

  Only to be destroyed by my brother’s ambition.

  REV. ABNER PEET

  I HAD no objection at all

  To selling my household effects at auction

  On the village square.

  It gave my beloved flock the chance

  To get something which had belonged to me

  For a memorial.

  But that trunk which was struck off

  To Burchard, the grog-keeper!

  Did you know it contained the manuscripts

  Of a lifetime of sermons?

  And he burned them as waste paper.

  JEFFERSON HOWARD

  MY valiant fight! For I call it valiant,

  With my father’s beliefs from old Virginia:

  Hating slavery, but no less war.

  I, full of spirit, audacity, courage

  Thrown into life here in Spoon River,

  With its dominant forces drawn from New England,

  Republicans, Calvinists, merchants, bankers,

  Hating me, yet fearing my arm.

  With wife and children heavy to carry—

  Yet fruits of my very zest of life.

  Stealing odd pleasures that cost me prestige,

  And reaping evils I had not sown;

  Foe of the church with its charnel dankness,

  Friend of the human touch of the tavern;

  Tangled with fates all alien to me,

  Deserted by hands I called my own.

  Then just as I felt my giant strength

  Short of breath, behold my children

  Had wound their lives in stranger gardens—