Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950). Spoon River Anthology. 1916.
Index of First Lines
- A chaplain in the army
- After a long day of work in my hot-houses
- After I got religion and steadied down
- After I had attended lectures
- After you have enriched your soul
- A game of checkers?
- All they said was true
- All your sorrow, Louise, and hatred of me
- Almost the shell of a woman after the surgeon’s knife!
- As a boy, Theodore, you sat for long hours
- A step-mother drove me from home, embittering me
- As to democracy, fellow citizens
- At first you will know not what they mean
- At first I suspected something
- At four o’clock in late October
- Back and forth, back and forth, to and from the church
- Bank broke and I lost my savings, The
- Better than granite, Spoon River
- Both for the country and for the man
- Buzzards wheel slowly, The
- Cooper should know about tubs, The
- Dear Jane! dear winsome Jane!
- Did I follow Truth wherever she led
- Did my widow flit about
- Did you ever find out
- Did you ever hear of Editor Whedon
- Did you ever see an alligator
- Doc Meyers said I had satyriasis
- Do the boys and girls still go to Siever’s
- Do you remember, O Delphic Apollo
- Do you remember, passer-by, the path
- Do you remember when I stood on the steps
- Do you think that odes and sermons
- Dust of my dust
- Earth keeps some vibration going, The
- Everyone laughed at Col. Prichard
- Father, thou canst never know
- From Bindle’s opera house in the village
- God! ask me not to record your wonders
- Harry Wilmans! You who fell in a swamp
- Have any of you, passers-by
- Have you seen walking through the village
- Henry got me with child
- He protested all his life long
- He ran away and was gone for a year
- Herbert broke our engagement of eight years
- Here I lie close to the grave
- Here lies the body of Lois Spears
- Here! You sons of the men
- Horses and men are just alike
- How did you feel, you libertarians
- How does it happen, tell me
- How many times, during the twenty years
- I am Minerva, the village poetess
- I began with Sir William Hamilton’s lectures
- I belonged to the church
- I, born in Weimar
- I bought every kind of machine that’s known
- I could not run or play
- Idea danced before us as a flag, The
- If a man could bite the giant hand
- If I could have lived another year
- If the excursion train to Peoria
- If the learned Supreme Court of Illinois
- If you in the village think that my work was a good one
- I grew spiritually fat living off the souls of men
- I had fiddled all at the county fair
- I had no objection at all
- I have studied many times
- I have two monuments besides this granite obelisk
- I inherited forty acres from my Father
- I know that he told that I snared his soul
- I leaned against the mantel, sick, sick
- I loathed you, Spoon River. I tried to rise above you
- I looked like Abraham Lincoln
- I lost my patronage in Spoon River
- I made two fights for the people
- In a lingering fever many visions come to you
- I never saw any difference
- In life I was the town drunkard
- In my Spanish cloak
- In the last spring I ever knew
- In the lust of my strength
- In youth my wings were strong and tireless
- I preached four thousand sermons
- I ran away from home with the circus
- I reached the highest place in Spoon River
- I said when they handed me my diploma
- I sat on the bank above Bernadotte
- Is it true, Spoon River
- I spent my money trying to elect you Mayor
- I staggered on through darkness
- I, the scourge-wielder, balance-wrecker
- It is true, fellow citizens
- It never came into my mind
- I tried to win the nomination
- It was just like everything else in life
- It was moon-light, and the earth sparkled
- It was only a little house of two rooms
- I wanted to be County Judge
- I wanted to go away to college
- I was a gun-smith in Odessa
- I was a lawyer like Harmon Whitney
- I was among multitudes of children
- I was a peasant girl from Germany
- I was attorney for the “Q”
- I was crushed between Altgeld and Armour
- I was just turned twenty-one
- I was not beloved of the villagers
- I was only eight years old
- I was sick, but more than that, I was mad
- I was sixteen, and I had the most terrible dreams
- I was the daughter of Lambert Hutchins
- I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge
- I was the laughing-stock of the village
- I was the milliner
- I was the only child of Frances Harris of Virginia
- I was the Sunday school superintendent
- I was the Widow McFarlane
- I was well known and much beloved
- I was Willie Metcalf
- I went to the dances at Chandlerville
- I went up and down the streets
- I who kept the greenhouse
- I winged my bird
- I won the prize essay at school
- I would have been as great as George Eliot
- I would I had thrust my hands of flesh
- I wrote him a letter asking him for old times’ sake
- Jonas Keene thought his lot a hard one
- Knowlt Hoheimer ran away to the war
- Maurice, weep not, I am not here under this pine tree
- Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army
- My father who owned the wagon-shop
- My life’s blossom might have bloomed on all sides
- My mind was a mirror
- My mother was for woman’s rights
- My name used to be in the papers daily
- My parents thought that I would be
- My thanks, friends of the County Scientific Association
- My valiant fight! For I call it valiant
- My wife lost her health
- Neither spite, fellow citizens
- No other man, unless it was Doc Hill
- Not “a youth with hoary head and haggard eye”
- Not character, not fortitude, not patience
- Nothing in life is alien to you
- Not in that wasted garden
- Not, where the stairway turns in the dark
- Observe the clasped hands!
- Of John Cabanis’ wrath and of the strife
- Often Aner Clute at the gate
- Oh many times did Ernest Hyde and I
- Oh! the dew-wet grass of the meadow in North Carolina
- Oh, you young radicals and dreamers
- On a mountain top above the clouds
- Once in a while a curious weed unknown to me
- Only the chemist can tell, and not always the chemist
- Out of a cell into this darkened space
- Out of me unworthy and unknown
- Out of the lights and roar of cities
- Over and over they used to ask me
- Passer by
- Passer-by, sin beyond any sin
- Pine woods on the hill, The
- Press of the Spoon River Clarion was wrecked, The
- Prohibitionists made me Town Marshal, The
- Reading in Ovid the sorrowful story of Itys
- Reverend Wiley advised me not to divorce him
- Rhodes’ slave! Selling shoes and gingham
- Rich, honored by my fellow citizens
- Samuel is forever talking of his elm
- Secret of the stars,—gravitation, The
- Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick
- She loved me. Oh! how she loved me!
- She took my strength by minutes
- Silent before the jury
- Spring and Summer, Fall and Winter and Spring
- Sudden death of Eugene Carman, The
- Suppose it is nothing but the hive
- Suppose you stood just five feet two
- Take note, passers-by, of the sharp erosions
- Tell me, was Altgeld elected Governor?
- Their spirits beat upon mine
- There at Geneva where Mt. Blanc floated above
- There by the window in the old house
- There is something about Death
- There is the caw of a crow
- There would be a knock at the door
- They brought me ambrotypes
- They called me the weakling, the simpleton
- They first charged me with disorderly conduct
- They got me into the Sunday-school
- They have chiseled on my stone the words
- They laughed at me as “Prof. Moon”
- They told me I had three months to live
- They would have lynched me
- This I saw with my own eyes
- This weeping willow!
- To all in the village I seemed, no doubt
- To be able to see every side of every question
- Together in this grave lie Benjamin Pantier, attorney at law
- To this generation I would say
- Toward the last
- Vegetarian, non-resistant, free-thinker, in ethics a Christian
- Very fall my sister Nancy Knapp, The
- Very well, you liberals
- Well, don’t you see this was the way of it
- Well, Emily Sparks, your prayers were not wasted
- We quarreled that morning
- Were you not ashamed, fellow citizens
- We stand about this place—we, the memories
- What but the love of God could have softened
- What do you see now?
- What will you do when you come to die
- Whenever the Presbyterian bell
- When Fort Sumter fell and the war came
- When I died, the circulating library
- When I first came to Spoon River
- When I went to the city, Mary McNeely
- When my moustache curled
- When Reuben Pantier ran away and threw me
- Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley
- Where is my boy, my boy
- While I was handling Dom Pedro
- White men played all sorts of jokes on me, The
- Who carved this shattered harp on my stone?
- Whoever thou art who passest by
- Why are you running so fast hither and thither
- Why did Albert Schirding kill himself
- Why did you bruise me with your rough places
- Why was I not devoured by self-contempt
- With our hearts like drifting suns, had we but walked
- Ye aspiring ones, listen to the story of the unknown
- Yes, here I lie close to a stunted rose bush
- Ye who are kicking against Fate
- Ye young debaters over the doctrine
- You are over there, Father Malloy
- You may think, passer-by, that Fate
- You never marveled, dullards of Spoon River
- You never understood, O unknown one
- You observe the carven hand
- You praise my self-sacrifice, Spoon River
- Your attention, Thomas Rhodes, president of the bank
- Your red blossoms amid green leaves
- You would not believe, would you