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Home  »  The Second Book of Modern Verse  »  Spoon River Anthology

Jessie B. Rittenhouse, ed. (1869–1948). The Second Book of Modern Verse. 1922.

Spoon River Anthology

WASHINGTON McNEELY

RICH, honored by my fellow citizens,

The father of many children, born of a noble mother,

All raised there

In the great mansion-house, at the edge of town.

Note the cedar tree on the lawn!

I sent all the boys to Ann Arbor, all of the girls to Rockford,

The while my life went on, getting more riches and honors—

Resting under my cedar tree at evening.

The years went on.

I sent the girls to Europe;

I dowered them when married.

I gave the boys money to start in business.

They were strong children, promising as apples

Before the bitten places show.

But John fled the country in disgrace.

Jenny died in child-birth—

I sat under my cedar tree.

Harry killed himself after a debauch,

Susan was divorced—

I sat under my cedar tree.

Paul was invalided from over study,

Mary became a recluse at home for love of a man—

I sat under my cedar tree.

All were gone, or broken-winged or devoured by life—

I sat under my cedar tree.

My mate, the mother of them, was taken—

I sat under my cedar tree,

Till ninety years were tolled.

O maternal Earth, which rocks the fallen leaf to sleep!

HARMON WHITNEY

OUT of the lights and roar of cities,

Drifting down like a spark in Spoon River,

Burnt out with the fire of drink, and broken,

The paramour of a woman I took in self-contempt,

But to hide a wounded pride as well.

To be judged and loathed by a village of little minds—

I, gifted with tongues and wisdom,

Sunk here to the dust of the justice court,

A picker of rags in the rubbage of spites and wrongs,—

I, whom fortune smiled on! I in a village,

Spouting to gaping yokels pages of verse,

Out of the lore of golden years,

Or raising a laugh with a flash of filthy wit

When they brought the drinks to kindle my dying mind.

To be judged by you,

The soul of me hidden from you,

With its wound gangrened

By love for a wife who made the wound,

With her cold white bosom, treasonous, pure and hard,

Relentless to the last, when the touch of her hand

At any time, might have cured me of the typhus,

Caught in the jungle of life where many are lost.

And only to think that my soul could not react,

As Byron’s did, in song, in something noble,

But turned on itself like a tortured snake—

Judge me this way, O world!

THOMAS TREVELYAN

READING in Ovid the sorrowful story of Itys,

Son of the love of Tereus and Procne, slain

For the guilty passion of Tereus for Philomela,

The flesh of him served to Tereus by Procne,

And the wrath of Tereus, the murderess pursuing

Till the gods made Philomela a nightingale,

Lute of the rising moon, and Procne a swallow!

Oh livers and artists of Hellas centuries gone,

Sealing in little thuribles dreams and wisdom,

Incense beyond all price, forever fragrant,

A breath whereof makes clear the eyes of the soul!

How I inhaled its sweetness here in Spoon River!

The thurible opening when I had lived and learned

How all of us kill the children of love, and all of us,

Knowing not what we do, devour their flesh;

And all of us change to singers, although it be

But once in our lives, or change—alas—to swallows,

To twitter amid cold winds and falling leaves!

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.

RUTHERFORD McDOWELL

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

Where the third generation lives, and the strong men

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

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!

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.

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!