Today’s Poem: Lucinda Matlock
Revisiting Spoon River
Lucinda Matlock
by Edgar Lee Masters
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.
When Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950) published his 1915 Spoon River Anthology, the book was a sensation among poets — “At last! At last America has discovered a poet,” Ezra Pound proclaimed in The Egoist — and a good-seller among readers.
The 244 free-verse poems in the book (narrated by 212 different characters) presented rural life as hard and back-breaking. And yet, the interweaving of their stories about themselves shows that life as a communal thing, rich with connections. See, for example, “The Hill,” Masters’s ubi-sunt graveyard entry in the book:
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.
Still, much of small-town life is presented as grim. The Midwest, in Masters’s fictionalized retelling of legends and gossip from generations along the Spoon River in Illinois, was a place of small but fiercely held passions, quiet crimes, and life scraped by.
Except for a few — notably Lucinda Matlock. From the grave, she looks back on her long life and wonders how anyone can complain about existence: “What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, / Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?” And in her strong conclusion, she warns, “Degenerate sons and daughters, / Life is too strong for you — / It takes life to love Life.” Maybe a lesson there, for a desolate and dissociated generation.
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I enjoyed "Spoon River Anthology" in high school, even though I was more excited by poems written in meter and rhyme (by Frost and Keats among others) and more engaged by the dislocations of "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land." In retrospect, what has stayed with me is the group portrait, the collective narrative of a community. I've tried it (for a real community in the late 19th century) in prose, but not in poetry.
What a difference a capital L makes!