Today’s Poem: Tragedy

Hometown girl

Luigi Loir, At the Fair, pre-1916 (meisterdrucke)

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Tragedy

by Jill Spargur

I always wanted a red balloon,
It only cost a dime,
But Ma said it was risky,
They broke so quickly,
And beside, she didn’t have time;
And even if she did, she didn’t
Think they were worth a dime.
We lived on a farm, and I only went
To one circus and fair,
And all the balloons I ever saw
Were there.
There were yellow ones and blue ones,
But the kind I liked the best
Were red, and I don’t see why
She couldn’t have stopped and said
That maybe I could have one —
But she didn’t — I suppose that now
You can buy them anywheres,
And that they still sell red ones
At circuses and fairs.
I got a little money saved;
I got a lot of time,
I got no one to tell me how to spend my dime;
Plenty of balloons — but somehow
There’s something died inside of me,
And I don’t want one — now.
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Jill Spargur (1907–1929) was not Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) or Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) or Elinor Wylie (1885–1928). Or Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), for that matter. She lacked Teasdale’s delicacy, Millay’s range, Wylie’s skill, Parker’s sparkle. She was just a South Dakota girl who died at age 22, leaving behind a small set of mostly immature poems.

As it happens, her hometown was my own: Pierre, South Dakota (pronounced by Dakotans as “pir,” like a fishing pier or a jury peer, and that’s how we identify outlanders), which created my interest in her. Pierre had a population of 3,659 in 1930 — so not a small town, exactly, but still an isolated outpost on the Missouri River, dividing the Midwest from the less-settled West.

The town boasted a Carnegie library, which opened in 1905, but Spargur never had access to the kind of literary publications and conversations that her contemporaries did (Millay, Wylie, and Parker on the East Coast, Teasdale in St. Louis). A tide of new women’s poetry was rising in the early 20th century, with many authors trying to breast the swell. And some of them successfully rode the wave of those decades, reaching the shore of permanent poetic reputation. But like many others, Spargur was pulled down into obscurity by the undertows of literary history.

Would she have made it to land, if she hadn’t died so young? This is an exercise in possibilities (“Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising”), which rarely comes to solid conclusions. Still, she was just 22 when she died, the author of a single locally published book. Appearances in St. Nicholas Magazine and the Literary Digest seemed to promise more, and there’s something in her precocious verse that begs for only a few more years to mature into a genuinely memorable poet’s work.

A Spargur poem in the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader newspaper, 9/30/1931.

To read her is to see that she was still adolescently sentimental, falling into bathos, and she needed a wider reading than Pierre in the 1920s offered, to firm up her meters and diction. But it’s hard not to think of what might have been. “Tragedy,” Today’s Poem, is her only anthologized piece, and readers can discern its faults: lack of control over her rhymes (“anywheres / . . . fairs”), over-explanation (“something died inside of me”), inexact diction (“Ma said it was risky”).

But maybe we can also discern the promise in this teenager’s poem about an emotion everyone has had: the melancholy of no longer wanting something when old enough to buy it.

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