Edgar Lee Masters and Desire from Beyond

There are a number of obvious observations about Spoon River Anthology: the poems are dramatic monologues, they are constructed out of everyday language; they eschew rhyme and meter; they are separate but joined in a larger project; they unstintingly explore social relations, especially marriage; the poems are imagined epitaphs. It is this last that interests me most. We hear from ghosts. Masters's use of the epitaph -- a speaker's voice from the other side of the grave -- creates a very productive emotional intensity based on the condemnation of eternity. The dead have lived their lives and can no longer alter their paths. Paradoxically, their temporal situation heightens the intensity of their desires rather than dissipating those desires. His speakers don't often take the perspective that what's done is done. Though the end is certainly final, there is a yearning exponentially greater in the dead than the living.

Mabel Osborne
Your red blossoms amid green leaves
Are drooping, beautiful geranium!
But you do not ask for water.
You cannot speak! You do not need to speak -
Everyone knows that you are dying of thirst,
Yet they do not bring water!
They pass on, saying:
"The geranium wants water."
And I, who had happiness to share
And longed to share your happiness;
I who loved you, Spoon River,
And craved your love,
Withered before your eyes, Spoon River -
Thirsting, thirsting,
Voiceless from chasteness of soul to ask you for love,
You who knew and saw me perish before you,
Like this geranium which someone has planted over me,
And left to die.

This dramatic monologue would have been despairing enough had it been written from the perspective of an old woman, but a dead one is even further removed from the object of desire. The dramatic intensity is increased by the fact that her fate is mirrored by the geranium upon her grave.

It is unfortunate that literary effects (such as the geranium as figure for the fading possibility of satisfaction) is so meagerly distributed in the text. The direct and conversational diction is substituted for poetic technique. There's little about a line like this from "Searcy Foote" to apprehend poetically: "I wanted to go away to college / But rich Aunt Persis wouldn't help me." Even the dramatic event of this poem is flattened by Masters's clinical delivery: "I poured the chloroform on a handkerchief / And held it to her nose until she died."

There's a surprising lack of similes and metaphors, though when they do appear they add some depth, for example when A. D. Blood complains that "the milliner's daughter Dora and the worthless son of Benjamin Pantier / Nightly make my grave their unholy pillow." The pillow evokes a productive conflation of rest and activity (i.e. death and sex) supercharged by its concision.