began to write. And yet, for all this poet's borrowings, in spite of his cynicism and disillusion, Masters' work is a continual if irritable quest for some key to the mystery of truth, the mastery of life. And there is always that definite milestone, the original Spoon River Anthology.

PETIT, THE POET1

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

Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrei-
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!

LUCINDA MATLOCK 1

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.

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

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,

But through separation.

Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!

*See pages 83, 147, 279, 293, 298, 400.

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

SILENCE 1

I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,

And the silence of the city when it pauses,

And the silence of a man and a maid,

And the silence for which music alone finds the word,

And the silence of the woods before the winds of spring

begin,

And the silence of the sick

When their eyes roam about the room.

And I ask: For the depths

Of what use is language?

A beast of the field moans a few times

When death takes its young.

And we are voiceless in the presence of realities—
We cannot speak.

A curious boy asks an old soldier

Sitting in front of the grocery store,

"How did you lose your leg?"

And the old soldier is struck with silence,

Or his mind flies away

Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.

It comes back jocosely

And he says, "A bear bit it off.'

And the boy wonders, while the old soldier

Dumbly, feebly lives over

The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,

The shrieks of the slain,

And himself lying on the ground,

And the hospital surgeons, the knives,

And the long days in bed.

But if he could describe it all

He would be an artist.

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan Company, from Songs and Satires by Edgar Lee Masters.

But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.

There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,

And the silence of a deep peace of mind,

And the silence of an embittered friendship,
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,

Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,

Comes with visions not to be uttered

Into a realm of higher life.

And the silence of the gods who understand each other with

out speech,

There is the silence of defeat.

There is the silence of those unjustly punished;

And the silence of the dying whose hand

Suddenly grips yours.

There is the silence between father and son,

When the father cannot explain his life,

Even though he be misunderstood for it.

There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.

There is the silence of those who have failed;

And the vast silence that covers

Broken nations and vanquished leaders.

There is the silence of Lincoln,

Thinking of the poverty of his youth.

And the silence of Napoleon

After Waterloo.

And the silence of Jeanne d'Arc

Saying amid the flames, "Blessèd Jesus"-
Revealing in two words all sorrow, all hope.

And there is the silence of age,

Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.

And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,

Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane, whose literary career was one of the most meteoric in American letters, was born in 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 ten printed volumes standing to his credit, two more announced for publication, and two others which were appearing serially.

Crane's most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), was written when he was twenty-two years old. What is even more astonishing is the fact that this detailed description of blood and battlefields was written by a civilian far from the scene of conflict. This novel (Crane's second) was an instantaneous and international success. The Atlantic Monthly pronounced it "great enough to set a new fashion in literature"; H. G. Wells, speaking of its influence in England, said Crane was "the first expression of the opening mind of a new period. a record of intensity beyond all precedent."

...

Crane's other books, although less powerful than The Red Badge of Courage, are scarcely less vivid. The Open Boat (1898) and The Monster (1899) are full of an intuitive wisdom and a sensitivity that caused Wells to exclaim, "The man who can call these 'brilliant fragments' would reproach Rodin for not 'completing' his fragments."

At various periods in Crane's brief career, he experimented in verse, seeking to find new effects in unrhymed lines, a new acuteness of vision. The results were embodied in two volumes of unusual poetry, The Black Riders (1895) and War Is Kind (1899),