Masters's work is a continual searching for some key to the mystery of truth, the mastery of life.

PETIT, THE POET1

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,

Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel—
Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens-
But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,

Ballades by the score with the same old thought:
The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;
And what is love but a rose that fades?
Life all around me here in the village:
Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth,
Courage, constancy, heroism, failure-
All in the loom, and, oh, what patterns!
Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers-

Blind to all of it all my life long.

Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,

Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,

While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines!

1

LUCINDA MATLOCK1

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,

Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan Company, from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.

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 * 1

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,

*See pages 54, 78, 139, 142, 172.

1

Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan Company, from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.

But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane, whose literary career was one of the most meteoric in American letters, was born at Newark, New Jersey, November 1, 1871. After taking a partial course at Lafayette College, he entered journalism at sixteen and, until the time of his death, was a reporter and writer of newspaper sketches. When he died, at the age of thirty, he had produced ten printed volumes (one of which, The Red Badge of Courage, is a classic among descriptive novels), two more announced for publication and two others which were appearing serially.

At various periods in Crane's brief career, he experimented in verse, seeking to find new effects in unrhymed lines for his acuteness of vision. The results were embodied in two volumes of unusual poetry, The Black Riders (1895) and War Is Kind (1899); lines that anticipated the Imagists and the epigrammatic free verse that followed fifteen years later. It is more than probable that his feverish energy of production aggravated the illness that caused Crane's death. He reached his refuge in the Black Forest only to die at the journey's end, June 5, 1900.

I SAW A MAN

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed at this;

I accosted the man.
"It is futile," I said,
"You can never"-

"You lie," he cried,
And ran on.

THE WAYFARER

The wayfarer,

Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
"Ha," he said,

"I see that no one has passed here
In a long time."

Later he saw that each weed

Was a singular knife.

"Well," he mumbled at last,

"Doubtless there are other roads."

THE BLADES OF GRASS

In Heaven,

Some little blades of grass

Stood before God.

"What did you do?"

Then all save one of the little blades

Began eagerly to relate

The merits of their lives.

This one stayed a small way behind,

Ashamed.

Presently, God said,

"And what did you do?"

The little blade answered, "Oh, my Lord,

Memory is bitter to me,

For, if I did good deeds,

I know not of them."

Then God, in all his splendor,

Arose from his throne.

"Oh, best little blade of grass!" he said.

Thomas Augustine Daly was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 28, 1871. He attended Villanova College and Fordham University (1889), leaving there at the end of his sophomore year to become a newspaper man.

Canzoni (1906) and Carmina (1909) contain the best-known of Daly's varied dialect verses. Although he has written in half a dozen different idioms including "straight" English (vide Songs of Wedlock, 1916), his half-humorous, halfpathetic interpretations of the Irish and Italian immigrants are his forte.

THE SONG OF THE THRUSH

Ah! the May was grand this mornin'!
Shure, how could I feel forlorn in

Such a land, when tree and flower tossed
their kisses to the breeze?

Could an Irish heart be quiet

While the Spring was runnin' riot,

An' the birds of free America were singin' in the trees? In the songs that they were singin'

No familiar note was ringin',

But I strove to imitate them an' I whistled like a lad. Oh, my heart was warm to love them

For the very newness of them—

For the ould songs that they helped me to forget-an' I was glad.

So I mocked the feathered choir

To my hungry heart's desire,

An' I gloried in the comradeship that made

their joy my own.

Till a new note sounded, stillin'

All the rest. A thrush was trillin'!