Edgar Lee Masters

She took my strength by minutes,
She took my life by hours,
She drained me like a fevered moon That saps the spinning world
The days went by like shadows,

Here I lie close to the grave Of Old Bill Piersol,
Who grew rich trading with the indians, and who Afterwards took the bankrupt law And emergeed from it richer than ever
Myself grown tired of toil and poverty And beholding how Old Bill a...

In my life I was the town drunkard;
When I died the priest denied me burial In holy ground
The which rebounded to my good fortune
For the Protestants bought this lot,

The earth keeps some vibration going There in your heart, and that is you
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life
What do you see, a harvest of clover

Not, where the stairway turns in the dark,
A hooded figure, shriveled under a flowing cloak
Not yellow eyes in the room at night,
Staring out from a surface of cobweb gray

They have Chiseled on my stone the words: 'His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
This was a man
' Those who knew me smile As they read this empty rhetoric
My epita...

The cooper should know about tubs
But I learned about life as well,
And you who loiter around these graves Think you know life
You think your eye sweeps about a wide horizon, perhaps,

I winged my bird,
Though he flew toward the setting sun;
But just as the shot rang out, he soared Up and up through the splinters of golden light,
Till he turned right over, feathers ruffled,

You praise my self-sacrifice,
Spoon River,
In rearing Irene and Mary,
Orphans of my older sister

I was crushed between Altgeld and Armour
I lost many friends, much time and
Fighting for Altgeld whom Editor
Denounced as the candidate of gamblers and anarchists

Oh, you young radicals and dreamers,
You dauntless
Who pass by my headstone,
Mock not its record of my captaincy in the

Dust of my dust,
And dust with my dust,
O, child who died as you entered the world,
Dead with my death