Read Spoon River Anthology Page 9


  THE secret of the stars,—gravitation.

  The secret of the earth,—layers of rock.

  The secret of the soil,—to receive seed.

  The secret of the seed,—the germ.

  The secret of man,—the sower.

  The secret of woman,—the soil.

  My secret: Under a mound that you shall never find.

  ADAM WEIRAUCH

  I WAS crushed between Altgeld and Armour.

  I lost many friends, much time and money

  Fighting for Altgeld whom Editor Whedon

  Denounced as the candidate of gamblers and anarchists.

  Then Armour started to ship dressed meat to Spoon River,

  Forcing me to shut down my slaughter-house,

  And my butcher shop went all to pieces.

  The new forces of Altgeld and Armour caught me

  At the same time.

  I thought it due me, to recoup the money I lost

  And to make good the friends that left me,

  For the Governor to appoint me Canal Commissioner.

  Instead he appointed Whedon of the Spoon River Argus,

  So I ran for the legislature and was elected.

  I said to hell with principle and sold my vote

  On Charles T. Yerkes’ street-car franchise.*

  Of course I was one of the fellows they caught.

  Who was it, Armour, Altgeld* or myself

  That ruined me?

  EZRA BARTLETT

  A CHAPLAIN in the army,

  A chaplain in the prisons,

  An exhorter in Spoon River,

  Drunk with divinity, Spoon River—

  Yet bringing poor Eliza Johnson to shame,

  And myself to scorn and wretchedness.

  But why will you never see that love of women,

  And even love of wine,

  Are the stimulants by which the soul, hungering for divinity,

  Reaches the ecstatic vision

  And sees the celestial outposts?

  Only after many trials for strength,

  Only when all stimulants fail,

  Does the aspiring soul

  By its own sheer power

  Find the divine

  By resting upon itself.

  AMELIA GARRICK

  YES, here I lie close to a stunted rose bush

  In a forgotten place near the fence

  Where the thickets from Siever’s woods

  Have crept over, growing sparsely.

  And you, you are a leader in New York,

  The wife of a noted millionaire,

  A name in the society columns,

  Beautiful, admired, magnified perhaps

  By the mirage of distance.

  You have succeeded, I have failed

  In the eyes of the world.

  You are alive, I am dead.

  Yet I know that I vanquished your spirit;

  And I know that lying here far from you,

  Unheard of among your great friends

  In the brilliant world where you move,

  I am really the unconquerable power over your life

  That robs it of complete triumph.

  JOHN HANCOCK OTIS

  AS to democracy, fellow citizens,

  Are you not prepared to admit

  That I, who inherited riches and was to the manner* born,

  Was second to none in Spoon River

  In my devotion to the cause of Liberty?

  While my contemporary, Anthony Findlay,

  Born in a shanty and beginning life

  As a water carrier to the section hands,

  Then becoming a section hand when he was grown,

  Afterwards foreman of the gang, until he rose

  To the superintendency of the railroad,

  Living in Chicago,

  Was a veritable slave driver,

  Grinding the faces of labor,

  And a bitter enemy of democracy.

  And I say to you, Spoon River,

  And to you, O republic,

  Beware of the man who rises to power

  From one suspender.

  ANTHONY FINDLAY

  BOTH for the country and for the man,

  And for a country as well as a man,

  ’Tis better to be feared than loved.

  And if this country would rather part

  With the friendship of every nation

  Than surrender its wealth,

  I say of a man ’tis worse to lose

  Money than friends.

  And I rend the curtain that hides the soul

  Of an ancient aspiration:

  When the people clamor for freedom

  They really seek for power o’er the strong.

  I, Anthony Findlay, rising to greatness

  From a humble water carrier,

  Until I could say to thousands “Come,”

  And say to thousands “Go,”

  Affirm that a nation can never be good,

  Or achieve the good,

  Where the strong and the wise have not the rod

  To use on the dull and weak.

  JOHN CABANIS

  NEITHER spite, fellow citizens,

  Nor forgetfulness of the shiftlessness,

  And the lawlessness and waste

  Under democracy’s rule in Spoon River

  Made me desert the party of law and order

  And lead the liberal party.

  Fellow citizens! I saw as one with second sight

  That every man of the millions of men

  Who give themselves to Freedom,

  And fail while Freedom fails,

  Enduring waste and lawlessness,

  And the rule of the weak and the blind,

  Dies in the hope of building earth,

  Like the coral insect, for the temple

  To stand on at the last.

  And I swear that Freedom will wage to the end

  The war for making every soul

  Wise and strong and as fit to rule

  As Plato’s lofty guardians

  In a world republic girdled!

  THE UNKNOWN

  YE aspiring ones, listen to the story of the unknown

  Who lies here with no stone to mark the place.

  As a boy reckless and wanton,

  Wandering with gun in hand through the forest

  Near the mansion of Aaron Hatfield,

  I shot a hawk perched on the top

  Of a dead tree.

  He fell with guttural cry

  At my feet, his wing broken.

  Then I put him in a cage

  Where he lived many days cawing angrily at me

  When I offered him food.

  Daily I search the realms of Hades

  For the soul of the hawk,

  That I may offer him the friendship

  Of one whom life wounded and caged.

  ALEXANDER THROCKMORTON

  IN youth my wings were strong and tireless,

  But I did not know the mountains.

  In age I knew the mountains

  But my weary wings could not follow my vision—

  Genius is wisdom and youth.

  JONATHAN SWIFT SOMERS*

  AFTER you have enriched your soul

  To the highest point,

  With books, thought, suffering, the understanding of many personalities,

  The power to interpret glances, silences,

  The pauses in momentous transformations,

  The genius of divination and prophecy;

  So that you feel able at times to hold the world

  In the hollow of your hand;

  Then, if, by the crowding of so many powers

  Into the compass of your soul,

  Your soul takes fire,

  And in the conflagration of your soul

  The evil of the world is lighted up and made clear—

  Be thankful if in that hour of supreme vision

  Life does not fiddle.

  WIDOW MCFARLANE<
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  I WAS the Widow McFarlane,

  Weaver of carpets for all the village.

  And I pity you still at the loom of life,

  You who are singing to the shuttle

  And lovingly watching the work of your hands,

  If you reach the day of hate, of terrible truth.

  For the cloth of life is woven, you know,

  To a pattern hidden under the loom—

  A pattern you never see!

  And you weave high-hearted, singing, singing,

  You guard the threads of love and friendship

  For noble figures in gold and purple.

  And long after other eyes can see

  You have woven a moon-white strip of cloth,

  You laugh in your strength, for Hope o’erlays it

  With shapes of love and beauty.

  The loom stops short! The pattern’s out!

  You’re alone in the room! You have woven a shroud!

  And hate of it lays you in it!

  CARL HAMBLIN

  THE press of the Spoon River Clarion was wrecked,

  And I was tarred and feathered,

  For publishing this on the day the Anarchists* were hanged in Chicago:

  “I saw a beautiful woman with bandaged eyes*

  Standing on the steps of a marble temple.

  Great multitudes passed in front of her,

  Lifting their faces to her imploringly.

  In her left hand she held a sword.

  She was brandishing the sword,

  Sometimes striking a child, again a laborer,

  Again a slinking woman, again a lunatic.

  In her right hand she held a scale;

  Into the scale pieces of gold were tossed

  By those who dodged the strokes of the sword.

  A man in a black gown read from a manuscript:

  ‘She is no respecter of persons.’

  Then a youth wearing a red cap

  Leaped to her side and snatched away the bandage.

  And lo, the lashes had been eaten away

  From the oozy eye-lids;

  The eye-balls were seared with a milky mucus;

  The madness of a dying soul

  Was written on her face—

  But the multitude saw why she wore the bandage.”

  EDITOR WHEDON

  To be able to see every side of every question;

  To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;

  To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,

  To use great feelings and passions of the human family

  For base designs, for cunning ends,

  To wear a mask like the Greek actors—

  Your eight-page paper—behind which you huddle,

  Bawling through the megaphone of big type:

  “This is I, the giant.”

  Thereby also living the life of a sneak-thief,

  Poisoned with the anonymous words

  Of your clandestine soul.

  To scratch dirt over scandal for money,

  And exhume it to the winds for revenge,

  Or to sell papers,

  Crushing reputations, or bodies, if need be,

  To win at any cost, save your own life.

  To glory in demoniac power, ditching civilization,

  As a paranoiac boy puts a log on the track

  And derails the express train.

  To be an editor, as I was.

  Then to lie here close by the river over the place

  Where the sewage flows from the village,

  And the empty cans and garbage are dumped,

  And abortions are hidden.

  EUGENE CARMAN

  RHODES’ slave! Selling shoes and gingham,

  Flour and bacon, overalls, clothing, all day long

  For fourteen hours a day for three hundred and thirteen days

  For more than twenty years.

  Saying “Yes’m” and “Yes, sir” and “Thank you”

  A thousand times a day, and all for fifty dollars a month.

  Living in this stinking room in the rattle-trap “Commercial.”

  And compelled to go to Sunday School, and to listen

  To the Rev. Abner Peet one hundred and four times a year

  For more than an hour at a time,

  Because Thomas Rhodes ran the church

  As well as the store and the bank.

  So while I was tying my neck-tie that morning

  I suddenly saw myself in the glass:

  My hair all gray, my face like a sodden pie.

  So I cursed and cursed: You damned old thing!

  You cowardly dog! You rotten pauper!

  You Rhodes’ slave! Till Roger Baughman

  Thought I was having a fight with some one,

  And looked through the transom just in time

  To see me fall on the floor in a heap

  From a broken vein in my head.

  CLARENCE FAWCETT

  THE sudden death of Eugene Carman

  Put me in line to be promoted to fifty dollars a month,

  And I told my wife and children that night.

  But it didn’t come, and so I thought

  Old Rhodes suspected me of stealing

  The blankets I took and sold on the side

  For money to pay a doctor’s bill for my little girl.

  Then like a bolt old Rhodes accused me,

  And promised me mercy for my family’s sake

  If I confessed, and so I confessed,

  And begged him to keep it out of the papers,

  And I asked the editors, too.

  That night at home the constable took me

  And every paper, except the Clarion,

  Wrote me up as a thief

  Because old Rhodes was an advertiser

  And wanted to make an example of me.

  Oh! well, you know how the children cried,

  And how my wife pitied and hated me,

  And how I came to lie here.

  W. LLOYD GARRISON STANDARD

  VEGETARIAN, non-resistant, free-thinker, in ethics a Christian;

  Orator apt at the rhine-stone rhythm of Ingersoll;*

  Carnivorous, avenger, believer and pagan;

  Continent, promiscuous, changeable, treacherous, vain,

  Proud, with the pride that makes struggle a thing for laughter;

  With heart cored out by the worm of theatric despair;

  Wearing the coat of indifference to hide the shame of defeat;

  I, child of the abolitionist idealism—

  A sort of Brand* in a birth of half-and-half.

  What other thing could happen when I defended

  The patriot scamps who burned the court house,

  That Spoon River might have a new one,

  Than plead them guilty? When Kinsey Keene drove through

  The card-board mask of my life with a spear of light,

  What could I do but slink away, like the beast of myself

  Which I raised from a whelp, to a corner and growl.

  The pyramid of my life was nought but a dune,

  Barren and formless, spoiled at last by the storm.

  PROFESSOR NEWCOMER

  EVERYONE laughed at Col. Prichard

  For buying an engine so powerful

  That it wrecked itself, and wrecked the grinder

  He ran it with.*

  But here is a joke of cosmic size:

  The urge of nature that made a man

  Evolve from his brain a spiritual life—

  Oh miracle of the world!—

  The very same brain with which the ape and wolf

  Get food and shelter and procreate themselves.

  Nature has made man do this,

  In a world where she gives him nothing to do

  After all—(though the strength of his soul goes round

  In a futile waste of power,

  To gear itself to the mills of the gods)—

  But get food and shelter and p
rocreate himself!

  RALPH RHODES

  ALL they said was true:

  I wrecked my father’s bank with my loans

  To dabble in wheat; but this was true—

  I was buying wheat for him as well,

  Who couldn’t margin the deal in his name

  Because of his church relationship.

  And while George Reece was serving his term

  I chased the will-o’-the-wisp of women,

  And the mockery of wine in New York.

  It’s deathly to sicken of wine and women

  When nothing else is left in life.

  But suppose your head is gray, and bowed

  On a table covered with acrid stubs

  Of cigarettes and empty glasses,

  And a knock is heard, and you know it’s the knock

  So long drowned out by popping corks

  And the pea-cock screams of demireps—

  And you look up, and there’s your Theft,*

  Who waited until your head was gray,

  And your heart skipped beats to say to you:

  The game is ended. I’ve called for you.

  Go out on Broadway and be run over,

  They’ll ship you back to Spoon River.

  MICKEY M’GREW

  IT was just like everything else in life:

  Something outside myself drew me down,

  My own strength never failed me.

  Why, there was the time I earned the money

  With which to go away to school,

  And my father suddenly needed help

  And I had to give him all of it.

  Just so it went till I ended up

  A man-of-all-work in Spoon River.

  Thus when I got the water-tower cleaned,

  And they hauled me up the seventy feet,

  I unhooked the rope from my waist,

  And laughingly flung my giant arms

  Over the smooth steel lips of the top of the tower—

  But they slipped from the treacherous slime,

  And down, down, down, I plunged

  Through bellowing darkness!

  ROSIE ROBERTS

  I WAS sick, but more than that, I was mad