In Spoon River Anthology, Masters creates a symbol for democracy at the town cemetery when he “buries” long-past residents, such as the town marshal, druggist, physician, and a housewife, side-by-side. Residents like “Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom, and Charley” lie alongside one unknown person and 245 identified graves on the hill above Spoon River. Their passing, equally egalitarian, juxtaposes fates such as fever and accident with brawling, jail, childbirth, and a suspicious fall from a bridge. The lamentations, griefs, and woes about death give place to a comforting blessing, “All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.” The narrative concludes with a dramatic epilogue that blends a checker game and Beelzebub’s oratory with the reassuring blessing of the sun and Milky Way. To a four-line homily written in old-school puritan moralizing—”Worship thy power, / Conquer thy hour, / Sleep not but strive, / So shalt thou live”—the poet claims the last word: “Infinite Law, / Infinite Life.”
“Petit, the Poet” (1915), one of the best of Masters’ nonjudgmental epitaphs, speaks the poet’s after-death faith in the lines, “Life all around me here in the village.” A repetitious craftsman (tick, tick, tick), Petit, named for the smallness of his vision, regrets the “little iambics” of his life’s work. To characterize spiritual poverty and poetic tedium, Masters imprisons elegant verse style in a confining “dry pod.” To further minimize the “triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, / Ballades by the score,” the simile “like mites in a quarrel” reduces them to ridicule. When his spirit is freed from the outworn snows and roses of Horace and François Villon, Petit is at last able to hear “Homer and Whitman” roaring in the pines.
One of Masters’ enduring characterizations of determination, “Lucinda Matlock” (1915) spins a tightly interconnected strand of meeting and marrying her husband and bearing their children. Locked into a pattern of nurturing, Lucinda devotes herself, over a seventy-year marriage, to raising children, nursing, and gardening. Now at age 96, she upbraids the young for their crankiness. Masters typifies Lucinda’s prairie-rich philosophy with the oft-quoted aphorism, “It takes life to love Life.”
“Doc Hill” is melodramatic compared to the other more restrained confessions in Spoon River Anthology. It focuses on the good deeds performed in compensation for a sad home life. Affectionately known as “Doc,” the title character has always been afraid to sever his fruitless, disastrous relationships with a spiteful wife and ruined son. Although Masters does not criticize or judge Doc’s wife and son, he implies the too-late sorry wisdom of looking out from the grave at the firm devotion of Em Stanton.
Although “Serepta Mason” is in the same vein, it is less successful than “Doc Hill” at expressing regret. Unlike Lucinda Matlock, who ventured out of the village and met new people, Serepta harbors resentment against villagers who saw only her stunted side. The epitaph slips into overblown language with the poet’s conclusions about “the unseen forces / That govern the processes of life.” More touching is the lament of a historical figure, Anne Rutledge, Abraham Lincoln’s beloved, who speaks with the patriotism of Walt Whitman, “Bloom forever, O Republic, / From the dust of my bosom!”
