[ Previous poetry corner installments here and here. ]
There's a good chance you've read at least some of Spoon River Anthology, Edgar Lee Masters' best-known work, a collection of poems in the form of autobiographical epitaphs delivered by dead former residents of the title town. It's a brilliant book, well worth reading in its entirety to get the full sense of how the lives connect and intersect with one another.
Two of my favorites from the book are George Gray and Lucinda Matlock—polar opposites that always felt to me like a warning on one hand and a wish on the other. Throughout my life I've thought of Lucinda Matlock as an ideal, sometimes close but always out of reach, and George Gray as a kind of dark birthright I've had to fight against continually, with mixed success.
I first read Masters (and many other poets) in a high school English class taught by Harvey Burns—one of the most gentle, encouraging, supportive teachers I ever had. It's because of him that I learned to appreciate poetry and started reading it for myself. I would have liked to thank him for that, but I never got the chance; several years after I'd graduated I happened to drive by the school, and the sign outside had Mr. Burns' name on it with the date of his birth, and another one as well. He'd died just that week. I'd only thought about him occasionally over the years, but when I found out he was gone it felt like a genuine loss.
I wonder what epitaph he'd write for himself, and if he'd know that it should include the lives like mine that he changed for the better.
So here they are. And just in case the universe isn't organized quite the way I think it is and you're somehow reading along: thank you, Mr. Burns.
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.
George Gray
I HAVE studied many times
The marble which was chiseled for me—
A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor.
In truth it pictures not my destination
But my life.
For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;
Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.
Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.
And now I know that we must lift the sail
And catch the winds of destiny
Wherever they drive the boat.
To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire—
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.
