Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950). Spoon River Anthology. 1916.

86. Petit, the Poet

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?