Spoon River Anthology: Quad Cities Voices

Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,

The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?

All, all are sleeping on the hill.

One passed in a fever,

One was burned in a mine,

One was killed in a brawl,

One died in a jail,

One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife —

All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,

The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one? —

All, all are sleeping on the hill.

One died in shameful child-birth,

One of a thwarted love,

One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,

One of a broken pride, in the search for heart's desire;

One after life in far-away London and Paris

Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag —

All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,

And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,

And Major Walker who had talked

With venerable men of the revolution? —

All, all are sleeping on the hill.

They brought them dead sons from the war,

And daughters whom life had crushed,

And their children fatherless, crying —

All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

Where is Old Fiddler Jones

Who played with life all his ninety years,

Braving the sleet with bared breast,

Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,

Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?

Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,

Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary's Grove,

Of what Abe Lincoln said

One time at Springfield.

Have you seen walking through the village

A man with downcast eyes and haggard face?

That is my husband who, by secret cruelty

Never to be told, robbed me of my youth and my beauty;

Till at last, wrinkled and with yellow teeth,

And with broken pride and shameful humility,

I sank into the grave.

But what think you gnaws at my husband's heart?

The face of what I was, the face of what he made me!

These are driving him to the place where I lie.

In death, therefore, I am avenged.

She took my strength by minutes,

She took my life by hours,

She drained me like a fevered moon

That saps the spinning world.

The days went by like shadows,

The minutes wheeled like stars.

She took the pity from my heart,

And made it into smiles.

She was a hunk of sculptor's clay,

My secret thoughts were fingers:

They flew behind her pensive brow

And lined it deep with pain.

They set the lips, and sagged the cheeks,

And drooped the eye with sorrow.

My soul had entered in the clay,

Fighting like seven devils.

It was not mine, it was not hers;

She held it, but its struggles

Modeled a face she hated,

And a face I feared to see.

I beat the windows, shook the bolts.

I hid me in a corner —

And then she died and haunted me,

And hunted me for life.

If a man could bite the giant hand

That catches and destroys him,

As I was bitten by a rat

While demonstrating my patent trap,

In my hardware store that day.

But a man can never avenge himself

On the monstrous ogre Life.

You enter the room — that's being born;

And then you must live — work out your soul,

Aha! the bait that you crave is in view:

A woman with money you want to marry,

Prestige, place, or power in the world.

But there's work to do and things to conquer —

Oh, yes! the wires that screen the bait.

At last you get in — but you hear a step:

The ogre, Life, comes into the room,

(He was waiting and heard the clang of the spring)

To watch you nibble the wondrous cheese,

And stare with his burning eyes at you,

And scowl and laugh, and mock and curse you,

Running up and down in the trap,

Until your misery bores him.

They have chiseled on my stone the words:

"His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him

That nature might stand up and say to all the world,

This was a man."

Those who knew me smile

As they read this empty rhetoric.

My epitaph should have been:

"Life was not gentle to him,

And the elements so mixed in him

That he made warfare on life

In the which he was slain."

While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,

Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph

Graven by a fool!

My life's blossom might have bloomed on all sides

Save for a bitter wind which stunted my petals

On the side of me which you in the village could see.

From the dust I lift a voice of protest:

My flowering side you never saw!

Ye living ones, ye are fools indeed

Who do not know the ways of the wind

And the unseen forces

That govern the processes of life.

You praise my self-sacrifice, Spoon River,

In rearing Irene and Mary,

Orphans of my older sister!

And you censure Irene and Mary

For their contempt for me!

But praise not my self-sacrifice,

And censure not their contempt;

I reared them, I cared for them, true enough! —

But I poisoned my benefactions

With constant reminders of their dependance.

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 businessmen

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 businessmen with prohibition,

And made Spoon River pay the cost

Of the fights that I had lost?

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.

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 though 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!

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 a 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!

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 are known.

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!

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.

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,

Blest 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.

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 ran away to the war

The day before Curl Trenary

Swore out a warrant through Justice Arnett

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.

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?

Maurice, weep not, I am not here under this pine tree.

The balmy air of spring whispers through the sweet grass,

The stars sparkle, the whippoorwill calls,

But thou grievest, while my soul lies rapturous

In the blest Nirvana of eternal light!

Go to the good heart that is my husband

Who broods upon what he calls our guilty love: —

Tell him that my love for you, no less than my love for him

Wrought out my destiny — that through the flesh

I won spirit, and through spirit, peace.

There is no marriage in heaven

But there is love.

From Bindle's opera house in the village

To Broadway is a great step.

But I tried to take it, my ambition fired

When sixteen years of age,

Seeing "East Lynne," played here in the village

By Ralph Barrett, the coming

Romantic actor, who enthralled my soul.

True, I trailed back home, a broken failure,

When Ralph disappeared in New York,

Leaving me alone in the city —

But life broke him also.

In all this place of silence

There are no kindred spirits.

How I wish Duse could stand amid the pathos

Of these quiet fields

And read these words.

We quarreled that morning,

For he was sixty-five, and I was thirty,

And I was nervous and heavy with the child

Whose birth I dreaded.

I thought over the last letter written me

By that estranged young soul

Whose betrayal of me I had concealed

By marrying the old man.

Then I took morphine and sat down to read.

Across the blackness that came over my eyes

I see the flickering light of these words even now:

"And Jesus said unto him, Verily

I say unto thee, To-day thou shalt

Be with me in paradise."