Анталогия Спун Реки

Contents

A

Altman, Herman
Armstrong, Hannah
Arnett, Harold
Arnett, Justice
Atheist, The Village
Atherton, Lucius
B

Ballard, John
Barker, Amanda
Barrett, Pauline
Bartlett, Ezra
Bateson, Marie
Beatty, Tom
Beethoven, Isaiah
Bennett, Hon. Henry
Bindle, Nicholas
Bliss, Mrs. Charles
Blood, A. D.
Bloyd, Wendell P.
Bone, Richard
Branson, Caroline
Brown, Jim
Brown, Sarah
Browning, Elijah
Burke, Robert Southey
Burleson, John Horace
Butler, Roy
C

Cabanis, Flossie
Cabanis, John
Calhoun, Granville
Calhoun, Henry C.
Campbell, Calvin
Carlisle, Jeremy
Carman, Eugene
Cheney, Columbus
Chicken, Ida
Childers, Elizabeth
Church, John M.
Churchill, Alfonso
Clapp, Homer
Clark, Nellie
Clute, Aner
Compton, Seth
Conant, Edith
Culbertson, E. C.
D

Davidson, Robert
Dement, Silas
Dippold the Optician
Dixon, Joseph
Dobyns, Batterton
Drummer, Frank
Drummer, Hare
Dunlap, Enoch
Dye, Shack
E

Ehrenhardt, Imanuel
Epilogue
F

Fallas, State’s Attorney
Fawcett, Clarence
Ferguson, Wallace
Findlay, Anthony
Fluke, Willard
Foote, Searcy
Ford, Webster
Fraser, Benjamin
Fraser, Daisy
French, Charlie
Frickey, Ida
G

Garber, James
Gardner, Samuel
Garrick, Amelia
Godbey, Jacob
Goldman, Le Roy
Goode, William
Goodhue, Harry Carey
Goodpasture, Jacob
Graham, Magrady
Gray, George
Green, Ami
Greene, Hamilton
Griffy, The Cooper
Gustine, Dorcas
H

Hainsfeather, Barney
Hamblin, Carl
Hately, Constance
Hatfield, Aaron
Hawkins, Elliott
Hawley, Jeduthan
Henry, Chase
Herndon, William H.
Heston, Roger
Higbie, Archibald
Hill, Doc
Hill, The
Hoheimer, Knowlt
Holden, Barry
Hookey, Sam
Houghton, Jonathan
Howard, Jefferson
Hueffer, Cassius
Hummel, Oscar
Humphrey, Lydia
Hurley, Scholfield
Hutchins, Lambert
Hyde, Ernest
I

Iseman, Dr. Siegfried
J

Jack, Blind
James, Godwin
Joe, Plymouth Rock
Johnson, Voltaire
Jones, Fiddler
Jones, Franklin
Jones, Indignation
Jones, Minerva
Jones, William
Judge, The Circuit
K

Karr, Elmer
Keene, Jonas
Kessler, Bert
Kessler, Mrs.
Killion, Captain Orlando
Kincaid, Russell
King, Lyman
Keene, Kinsey
Knapp, Nancy
Konovaloff, Ippolit
Kritt, Dow
L

Layton, Henry
Lively, Judge Selah
M

M’Cumber, Daniel
McDowell, Rutherford
McFarlane, Widow
McGee, Fletcher
McGee, Ollie
M’Grew, Jennie
M’Grew, Mickey
McGuire, Jack
McNeely, Mary
McNeely, Paul
McNeely, Washington
Malloy, Father
Marsh, Zilpha
Marshal, The Town
Marshall, Herbert
Mason, Serepta
Matheny, Faith
Matlock, Davis
Matlock, Lucinda
Melveny, Abel
Merritt, Mrs.
Merritt, Tom
Metcalf, Willie
Meyers, Doctor
Meyers, Mrs.
Micure, Hamlet
Miles, J. Milton
Miller, Julia
Miner, Georgine Sand
Moir, Alfred
N

Newcomer, Professor
Night-Watch, Andy The
Nutter, Isa
O

Osborne, Mabel
Otis, John Hancock
P

Pantier, Benjamin
Pantier, Mrs. Benjamin
Pantier, Reuben
Peet, Rev. Abner
Pennington, Willie
Penniwit, the Artist
Petit, the Poet
Phipps, Henry
Poague, Peleg
Pollard, Edmund
Potter, Cooney
Puckett, Lydia
Purkapile, Mrs.
Purkapile, Roscoe
Putt, Hod
R

Reece, Mrs. George
Rhodes, Ralph
Rhodes, Thomas
Richter, Gustav
Robbins, Hortense
Roberts, Rosie
Ross, Thomas, Jr.
Russian Sonia
Rutledge, Anne
S

Sayre, Johnnie
Scates, Hiram
Schirding, Albert
Schmidt, Felix
Schr;der The Fisherman
Scott, Julian
Sersmith the Dentist
Sewall, Harlan
Sharp, Percival
Shaw, “Ace”
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Shope, Tennessee Claflin
Sibley, Amos
Sibley, Mrs.
Siever, Conrad
Simmons, Walter
Sissman, Dillard
Slack, Margaret Fuller
Smith, Louise
Soldiers, Many
Somers, Jonathan Swift
Somers, Judge
Sparks, Emily
Spears, Lois
Spooniad, The
Standard, W. Lloyd Garrison
Stewart, Lillian
Stoddard, Judson
T

Tanner, Robert Fulton
Taylor, Deacon
Theodore, The Poet
Thornton, English
Throckmorton, Alexander
Todd, Eugenia
Tompkins, Josiah
Trainor, the Druggist
Trevelyan, Thomas
Trimble, George
Tripp, Henry
Tubbs, Hildrup
Turner, Francis
Tutt, Oaks
U

Unknown, The
W

Wasson, John
Wasson, Rebecca
Webster, Charles
Weirauch, Adam
Weldy, “Butch”
Wertman, Elsa
Whedon, Editor
Whitney, Harmon
Wiley, Rev. Lemuel
Will, Arlo
William and Emily
Williams, Dora
Williams, Mrs.
Wilmans, Harry
Witt, Zenas
Y

Yee Bow
Z

Zoll, Perry
The Hill

Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
All, all are sleeping on the hill.

One passed in a fever,
One was burned in a mine,
One was killed in a brawl,
One died in a jail,
One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife—
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?—
All, all are sleeping on the hill.

One died in shameful child-birth,
One of a thwarted love,
One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
One of a broken pride, in the search for heart’s desire;
One after life in far-away London and Paris
Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag—
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
And Major Walker who had talked
With venerable men of the revolution?—
All, all are sleeping on the hill.

They brought them dead sons from the war,
And daughters whom life had crushed,
And their children fatherless, crying—
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

Where is Old Fiddler Jones
Who played with life all his ninety years,
Braving the sleet with bared breast,
Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,
Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?
Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,
Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary’s Grove,
Of what Abe Lincoln said
One time at Springfield.
Hod Putt

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 emerged from it richer than ever
Myself grown tired of toil and poverty
And beholding how Old Bill and others grew in wealth
Robbed a traveler one Night near Proctor’s Grove,
Killing him unwittingly while doing so,
For which I was tried and hanged.
That was my way of going into bankruptcy.
Now we who took the bankrupt law in our respective ways
Sleep peacefully side by side.
Ollie McGee

Have you seen walking through the village
A man with downcast eyes and haggard face?
That is my husband who, by secret cruelty
Never to be told, robbed me of my youth and my beauty;
Till at last, wrinkled and with yellow teeth,
And with broken pride and shameful humility,
I sank into the grave.
But what think you gnaws at my husband’s heart?
The face of what I was, the face of what he made me!
These are driving him to the place where I lie.
In death, therefore, I am avenged.
Fletcher McGee

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,
The minutes wheeled like stars.
She took the pity from my heart,
And made it into smiles.
She was a hunk of sculptor’s clay,
My secret thoughts were fingers:
They flew behind her pensive brow
And lined it deep with pain.
They set the lips, and sagged the cheeks,
And drooped the eye with sorrow.
My soul had entered in the clay,
Fighting like seven devils.
It was not mine, it was not hers;
She held it, but its struggles
Modeled a face she hated,
And a face I feared to see.
I beat the windows, shook the bolts.
I hid me in a corner
And then she died and haunted me,
And hunted me for life.
Robert Fulton Tanner

If a man could bite the giant hand
That catches and destroys him,
As I was bitten by a rat
While demonstrating my patent trap,
In my hardware store that day.
But a man can never avenge himself
On the monstrous ogre Life.
You enter the room—that’s being born;
And then you must live—work out your soul,
Aha! the bait that you crave is in view:
A woman with money you want to marry,
Prestige, place, or power in the world.
But there’s work to do and things to conquer—
Oh, yes! the wires that screen the bait.
At last you get in—but you hear a step:
The ogre, Life, comes into the room,
(He was waiting and heard the clang of the spring)
To watch you nibble the wondrous cheese,
And stare with his burning eyes at you,
And scowl and laugh, and mock and curse you,
Running up and down in the trap,
Until your misery bores him.
Cassius Hueffer

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 epitaph should have been:
“Life was not gentle to him,
And the elements so mixed in him
That he made warfare on life
In the which he was slain.”
While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,
Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph
Graven by a fool!
Serepta Mason

My life’s blossom might have bloomed on all sides
Save for a bitter wind which stunted my petals
On the side of me which you in the village could see.
From the dust I lift a voice of protest:
My flowering side you never saw!
Ye living ones, ye are fools indeed
Who do not know the ways of the wind
And the unseen forces
That govern the processes of life.
Amanda Barker

Henry got me with child,
Knowing that I could not bring forth life
Without losing my own.
In my youth therefore I entered the portals of dust.
Traveler, it is believed in the village where I lived
That Henry loved me with a husband’s love
But I proclaim from the dust
That he slew me to gratify his hatred.
Constance Hately

You praise my self-sacrifice, Spoon River,
In rearing Irene and Mary,
Orphans of my older sister!
And you censure Irene and Mary
For their contempt for me!
But praise not my self-sacrifice.
And censure not their contempt;
I reared them, I cared for them, true enough!—
But I poisoned my benefactions
With constant reminders of their dependence.
Chase Henry

In life I was the town drunkard;
When I died the priest denied me burial
In holy ground.
The which redounded to my good fortune.
For the Protestants bought this lot,
And buried my body here,
Close to the grave of the banker Nicholas,
And of his wife Priscilla.
Take note, ye prudent and pious souls,
Of the cross—currents in life
Which bring honor to the dead, who lived in shame
Harry Carey Goodhue

You never marveled, dullards of Spoon River,
When Chase Henry voted against the saloons
To revenge himself for being shut off.
But none of you was keen enough
To follow my steps, or trace me home
As Chase’s spiritual brother.
Do you remember when I fought
The bank and the courthouse ring,
For pocketing the interest on public funds?
And when I fought our leading citizens
For making the poor the pack-horses of the taxes?
And when I fought the water works
For stealing streets and raising rates?
And when I fought the business men
Who fought me in these fights?
Then do you remember:
That staggering up from the wreck of defeat,
And the wreck of a ruined career,
I slipped from my cloak my last ideal,
Hidden from all eyes until then,
Like the cherished jawbone of an ass,
And smote the bank and the water works,
And the business men with prohibition,
And made Spoon River pay the cost
Of the fights that I had lost.
Judge Somers

How does it happen, tell me,
That I who was most erudite of lawyers,
Who knew Blackstone and Coke
Almost by heart, who made the greatest speech
The court-house ever heard, and wrote
A brief that won the praise of Justice Breese
How does it happen, tell me,
That I lie here unmarked, forgotten,
While Chase Henry, the town drunkard,
Has a marble block, topped by an urn
Wherein Nature, in a mood ironical,
Has sown a flowering weed?
Kinsey Keene

Your attention, Thomas Rhodes, president of the bank;
Coolbaugh Whedon, editor of the Argus;
Rev. Peet, pastor of the leading church;
A. D. Blood, several times Mayor of Spoon River;
And finally all of you, members of the Social Purity Club—
Your attention to Cambronne’s dying words,
Standing with the heroic remnant
Of Napoleon’s guard on Mount Saint Jean
At the battle field of Waterloo,
When Maitland, the Englishman, called to them:
“Surrender, brave Frenchmen!”—
There at close of day with the battle hopelessly lost,
And hordes of men no longer the army
Of the great Napoleon
Streamed from the field like ragged strips
Of thunder clouds in the storm.
Well, what Cambronne said to Maitland
Ere the English fire made smooth the brow of the hill
Against the sinking light of day
Say I to you, and all of you,
And to you, O world.
And I charge you to carve it
Upon my stone.