The New Poetry: An Anthology

by Unknown

SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY

THE HILL

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.

OLLIE M^cGEE

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.

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!

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?

DOC HILL

I went up and down the streets

Here and there by day and night,

Through all hours of the night caring for the poor who were sick.

Do you know why?

My wife hated me, my son went to the dogs.

And I turned to the people and poured out my love to them.

Sweet it was to see the crowds about the lawns on the day of my funeral,

And hear them murmur their love and sorrow.

But oh, dear God, my soul trembled, scarcely able

To hold to the railing of the new life

When I saw Em Stanton behind the oak tree

At the grave,

Hiding herself, and her grief!

FIDDLER JONES

The earth keeps some vibration going

There in your heart, and that is you.

And if the people find you can fiddle,

Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.

What do you see, a harvest of clover?

Or a meadow to walk through to the river?

The wind’s in the corn; you rub your hands

For beeves hereafter ready for market;

Or else you hear the rustle of skirts

Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.

To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust

Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;

They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy

Stepping it off, to “Toor-a-Loor.”

How could I till my forty acres

Not to speak of getting more,

With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos

Stirred in my brain by crows and robins

And the creak of a wind-mill—only these?

And I never started to plow in my life

That some one did not stop in the road

And take me away to a dance or picnic.

I ended up with forty acres;

I ended up with a broken fiddle—

And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,

And not a single regret.

THOMAS RHODES

Very well, you liberals,

And navigators into realms intellectual,

You sailors through heights imaginative,

Blown about by erratic currents, tumbling into air pockets,

You Margaret Fuller Slacks, Petits,

And Tennessee Claflin Shopes—

You found with all your boasted wisdom

How hard at the last it is

To keep the soul from splitting into cellular atoms.

While we, seekers of earth’s treasures,

Getters and hoarders of gold,

Are self-contained, compact, harmonized,

Even to the end.

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.

SETH COMPTON

When I died, the circulating library

Which I built up for Spoon River,

And managed for the good of inquiring minds,

Was sold at auction on the public square,

As if to destroy the last vestige

Of my memory and influence.

For those of you who could not see the virtue

Of knowing Volney’s Ruins as well as Butler’s Analogy

And Faust as well as Evangeline,

Were really the power in the village,

And often you asked me,

“What is the use of knowing the evil in the world?”

I am out of your way now, Spoon River—

Choose your own good and call it good.

For I could never make you see

That no one knows what is good

Who knows not what is evil;

And no one knows what is true

Who knows not what is false.

HENRY C. CALHOUN

I reached the highest place in Spoon River,

But through what bitterness of spirit!

The face of my father, sitting speechless,

Child-like, watching his canaries,

And looking at the court-house window

Of the county judge’s room,

And his admonitions to me to seek

My own in life, and punish Spoon River

To avenge the wrong the people did him,

Filled me with furious energy

To seek for wealth and seek for power.

But what did he do but send me along

The path that leads to the grove of the Furies?

I followed the path and I tell you this:

On the way to the grove you’ll pass the Fates,

Shadow-eyed, bent over their weaving.

Stop for a moment, and if you see

The thread of revenge leap out of the shuttle

Then quickly snatch from Atropos

The shears and cut it, lest your sons,

And the children of them and their children

Wear the envenomed robe.

PERRY ZOLL

My thanks, friends of the County Scientific Association,

For this modest boulder,

And its little tablet of bronze.

Twice I tried to join your honored body,

And was rejected,

And when my little brochure

On the intelligence of plants

Began to attract attention

You almost voted me in.

After that I grew beyond the need of you

And your recognition.

Yet I do not reject your memorial stone,

Seeing that I should, in so doing,

Deprive you of honor to yourselves.

ARCHIBALD HIGBIE

I loathed you, Spoon River. I tried to rise above you,

I was ashamed of you. I despised you

As the place of my nativity.

And there in Rome, among the artists,

Speaking Italian, speaking French,

I seemed to myself at times to be free

Of every trace of my origin.

I seemed to be reaching the heights of art

And to breathe the air that the masters breathed,

And to see the world with their eyes.

But still they’d pass my work and say:

“What are you driving at, my friend?

Sometimes the face looks like Apollo’s,

At others it has a trace of Lincoln’s.”

There was no culture, you know, in Spoon River,

And I burned with shame and held my peace.

And what could I do, all covered over

And weighted down with western soil,

Except aspire, and pray for another

Birth in the world, with all of Spoon River

Rooted out of my soul?

FATHER MALLOY

You are over there, Father Malloy,

Where holy ground is, and the cross marks every grave,

Not here with us on the hill—

Us of wavering faith, and clouded vision

And drifting hope, and unforgiven sins.

You were so human, Father Malloy,

Taking a friendly glass sometimes with us,

Siding with us who would rescue Spoon River

From the coldness and the dreariness of village morality.

You were like a traveler who brings a little box of sand

From the wastes about the pyramids

And makes them real and Egypt real.

You were a part of and related to a great past,

And yet you were so close to many of us.

You believed in the joy of life.

You did not seem to be ashamed of the flesh.

You faced life as it is,

And as it changes.

Some of us almost came to you, Father Malloy,

Seeing how your church had divined the heart,

And provided for it,

Through Peter the Flame,

Peter the Rock.

LUCINDA MATLOCK

I went to the dances at Chandlerville,

And played snap-out at Winchester.

One time we changed partners,

Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,

And then I found Davis.

We were married and lived together for seventy years,

Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,

Eight of whom we lost

Ere I had reached the age of sixty.

I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,

I made the garden, and for holiday

Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,

And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,

And many a flower and medicinal weed—

Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.

At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,

And passed to a sweet repose.

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,

Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?

Degenerate sons and daughters,

Life is too strong for you—

It takes life to love Life.

ANNE RUTLEDGE

Out of me unworthy and unknown

The vibrations of deathless music;

“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,

And the beneficent face of a nation

Shining with justice and truth.

I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,

Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,

Wedded to him, not through union,

But through separation.

Bloom forever, O Republic,

From the dust of my bosom!

WILLIAM H. HERNDON

There by the window in the old house

Perched on the bluff, overlooking miles of valley,

My days of labor closed, sitting out life’s decline,

Day by day did I look in my memory,

As one who gazes in an enchantress’ crystal globe,

And I saw the figures of the past,

As if in a pageant glassed by a shining dream,

Move through the incredible sphere of time.

And I saw a man arise from the soil like a fabled giant

And throw himself over a deathless destiny,

Master of great armies, head of the republic,

Bringing together into a dithyramb of recreative song

The epic hopes of a people;

At the same time Vulcan of sovereign fires,

Where imperishable shields and swords were beaten out

From spirits tempered in heaven.

Look in the crystal! See how he hastens on

To the place where his path comes up to the path

Of a child of Plutarch and Shakespeare.

O Lincoln, actor indeed, playing well your part,

And Booth, who strode in a mimic play within the play,

Often and often I saw you,

As the cawing crows winged their way to the wood

Over my house-top at solemn sunsets,

There by my window,

Alone.

RUTHERFORD M^cDOWELL

They brought me ambrotypes

Of the old pioneers to enlarge.

And sometimes one sat for me—

Some one who was in being

When giant hands from the womb of the world

Tore the republic.

What was it in their eyes?—

For I could never fathom

That mystical pathos of drooped eyelids,

And the serene sorrow of their eyes.

It was like a pool of water,

Amid oak trees at the edge of a forest,

Where the leaves fall,

As you hear the crow of a cock

From a far-off farm house, seen near the hills

Where the third generation lives, and the strong men

And the strong women are gone and forgotten.

And these grand-children and great grand-children

Of the pioneers!—

Truly did my camera record their faces, too,

With so much of the old strength gone,

And the old faith gone,

And the old mastery of life gone,

And the old courage gone,

Which labors and loves and suffers and sings

Under the sun!

ARLO WILL

Did you ever see an alligator

Come up to the air from the mud,

Staring blindly under the full glare of noon?

Have you seen the stabled horses at night

Tremble and start back at the sight of a lantern?

Have you ever walked in darkness

When an unknown door was open before you

And you stood, it seemed, in the light of a thousand candles

Of delicate wax?

Have you walked with the wind in your ears

And the sunlight about you

And found it suddenly shine with an inner splendor?

Out of the mud many times,

Before many doors of light,

Through many fields of splendor,

Where around your steps a soundless glory scatters

Like new-fallen snow,

Will you go through earth, O strong of soul,

And through unnumbered heavens

To the final flame!

AARON HATFIELD

Better than granite, Spoon River,

Is the memory-picture you keep of me

Standing before the pioneer men and women

There at Concord Church on Communion day.

Speaking in broken voice of the peasant youth

Of Galilee who went to the city

And was killed by bankers and lawyers;

My voice mingling with the June wind

That blew over wheat fields from Atterbury;

While the white stones in the burying ground

Around the Church shimmered in the summer sun.

And there, though my own memories

Were too great to bear, were you, O pioneers,

With bowed heads breathing forth your sorrow

For the sons killed in battle and the daughters

And little children who vanished in life’s morning,

Or at the intolerable hour of noon.

But in those moments of tragic silence,

When the wine and bread were passed,

Came the reconciliation for us—

Us the ploughmen and the hewers of wood,

Us the peasants, brothers of the peasant of Galilee—

To us came the Comforter

And the consolation of tongues of flame!

WEBSTER FORD

Do you remember, O Delphic Apollo,

The sunset hour by the river, when Mickey M’Grew

Cried, “There’s a ghost,” and I, “It’s Delphic Apollo”;

And the son of the banker derided us, saying, “It’s light

By the flags at the water’s edge, you half-witted fools.”

And from thence, as the wearisome years rolled on, long after

Poor Mickey fell down in the water tower to his death,

Down, down, through bellowing darkness, I carried

The vision which perished with him like a rocket which falls

And quenches its light in earth, and hid it for fear

Of the son of the banker, calling on Plutus to save me?

Avenged were you for the shame of a fearful heart,

Who left me alone till I saw you again in an hour

When I seemed to be turned to a tree with trunk and branches

Growing indurate, turning to stone, yet burgeoning

In laurel leaves, in hosts of lambent laurel,

Quivering, fluttering, shrinking, fighting the numbness

Creeping into their veins from the dying trunk and branches!

’Tis vain, O youth, to fly the call of Apollo.

Fling yourselves in the fire, die with a song of spring,

If die you must in the spring. For none shall look

On the face of Apollo and live, and choose you must

’Twixt death in the flame and death after years of sorrow,

Rooted fast in the earth, feeling the grisly hand,

Not so much in the trunk as in the terrible numbness

Creeping up to the laurel leaves that never cease

To flourish until you fall. O leaves of me

Too sere for coronal wreaths, and fit alone

For urns of memory, treasured, perhaps, as themes

For hearts heroic, fearless singers and livers—

Delphic Apollo!