Edgar Lee Masters – Spoon River Anthology

While reading two of the poems in our book and then a couple online, I was struck at how similar the Canterbury Tales these poems seem to be. Although they are not identical to the Canterbury Tales, which is good otherwise that would be considered plagarism, they are still in a similar format to those stories and were actually fun to read. I had to read the first two in our book to get a better understanding as to what type of writing it was exactly, but eventually I was able to figure out that it was probably realism along with naturalism. The two I read, Lucinda Matlock and Fiddler Jones, were both actually fun to read. Lucinda Matlock was just telling the story of a woman and how she finds her husband, has twelve kids, loses eight of them, and then at the age of ninety-six, dies.

By showing the natural way of life in Lucinda Matlock, I was able to read a somewhat lightheartening poem about a woman and her life in a couple of stanzas. There was one line, however, that I found in that particular poem that I liked a lot. It was, "At ninety-six, I had lived enough, that is all, And passed to a sweet repose-What is this I hear of sorry and weariness, Anger discontent and drooping hopes? Degenerate sons and daughters, Life is too strong for you- It takes life to love Life" (Masters 516).

The last line was one of my favorites, because it was so thought provoking. She is saying that it takes your entire life to actually learn to love life for all that it is worth. Like right now, I cannot know exactly how to love life and what it takes for me to know everything there is to know about life. Life is too strong for us, like the poem states. This line goes on to contradict a couple of the other poems I have read which are talking about how life just does not seem to be worth it, so the characters end it, for whatever reason. Therefore, this poem was one that made me sit and think about its meaning for a while before writing in my blog.


Fiddler Jones was another lighthearted poem to read, as it seemed to have a good tone to it, along with its message. I was thinking of Little House on the Praire when I read this poem as well, and not just because it had to do with the fiddle playing. The people in the poem seemed to have almost no care in the world and just seem to take life as it comes at them, which is kind of cool in my opinion. I wish that I could be able to live life like that now. Unfortunatly, given the times, that is not exactly possible anymore. My favorite lines in this poem were, "And I never started to plow in my life That some one did not stop in the road And take me away to a dance or picnic. I ended up with forty acres; I ended up with a broken fiddle- And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories, And not a single regret" (Masters 517). I liked those lines so much just because even though they had work to do, the fiddlers would put their work aside for the pleasure of someone elses company, which I think is really cool, especially since they had no regrets about it later.


Works Cited:

Masters, Edgar Lee. "Lucinda Matlock." American Literature Textbook. Columbus: McGraw-Hill, 2009. 516. Print.

Masters, Edgar Lee. "Fiddler Jones." American Literature Textbook. Columbus: McGraw-Hill, 2009. 517. Print.