THE PRODIGAL SON

You are not merry, brother. Why not laugh,
As I do, and acclaim the fatted calf?
For, unless ways are changing here at home,
You might not have it if I had not come.
And were I not a thing for you and me
To execrate in anguish, you would be
As indigent a stranger to surprise,
I fear, as I was once, and as unwise.
Brother, believe as I do, it is best

For you that I'm again in the old nest-
Draggled, I grant you, but your brother still,
Full of good wine, good viands, and good will.
You will thank God, some day, that I returned,
And may be singing for what you have learned,
Some other day; and one day you may find
Yourself a little nearer to mankind.
And having hated me till you are tired,
You will begin to see, as if inspired,
It was fate's way of educating us.
Remembering then when you were venomous,
You will be glad enough that I am gone,
But you will know more of what's going on;
For you will see more of what makes it go,
And in more ways than are for you to know.
We are so different when we are dead,
That you, alive, may weep for what you said;
And I, the ghost of one you could not save,
May find you planting lentils on my grave.

E

Edgar Lee Masters

dgar lee masterS was born at Garnett, Kansas, August 23, 1869, of Puritan and pioneering stock. When he was still a boy, the family moved to Illinois, where, after desultory schooling, he studied law in his father's office at Lewiston. For a year he practiced with his father and then went to Chicago, where he became a successful attorney. Before going to Chicago, Masters had composed a quantity of rhymed verse in traditional forms on traditional themes; by the time he was twenty-four he had written about four hundred poems, the result of wide reading and the influence of Poe, Keats, Shelley, and Swinburne.

Masters' first volume of poems, published in his twenty-ninth year, was modestly entitled (perhaps with an implied bow to Omar Khayyám) A Book of Verses. With even greater modesty his second volume, The Blood of the Prophets (1905), was signed with a pseudonym, "Dexter Wallis." For the third book, Songs and Sonnets (1910), Masters adopted another pseudonym composed, this time, of the names of two Elizabethan dramatists: "Webster Ford." Meanwhile, under his own name, the author had published several plays-Maximilian (1902), Althea (1907), The Trifler (1908), The Leaves of the Tree (1909), Eileen (1910), The Locket (1910)—and a set of essays, The New Star Chamber (1904).

Although industry is evident in the number and variety of these volumes there is little to indicate the vigor and driving honesty which propelled the succeeding work. Masters himself felt uncertain of his future, crippled by his environment. "I feel that no poet in English or American history had a harder life than mine was in the beginning at Lewiston," he wrote in his autobiography, Across Spoon River (1936), “among a people whose flesh and whose vibrations were better calculated to poison, to pervert, and even to kill a sensitive nature."

Masters left Lewiston for Chicago and became the partner of a famous criminal lawyer. Eight years later, his partner defaulted, professional and political enemies combined against him, and he plunged into the excited Chicago literary "movement" of 1912.

In 1914, Masters, at the suggestion of his friend, William Marion Reedy, turned from his preoccupation with classic subjects and began to draw upon the life he knew for those concise records which made him famous. Taking as his model The Greek Anthology, which Reedy had pressed upon him, Masters evolved Spoon River Anthology, that astonishing assemblage of over two hundred self-inscribed epitaphs, in which the dead of a Middle Western town are supposed to have written the truth about themselves. Through these frank revelations, many of them interrelated, the village is re-created; it lives again with all its intrigues, hypocrisies, feuds, martyrdoms and occasional exaltations. The monotony of existence in a drab township, the defeat of ideals, the struggle toward higher goals are synthesized in these crowded pages. All moods and all manner of voices are heard here-even Masters', who explains the selection of his form through "Petit, the Poet."

The success of the volume was extraordinary. With every new attack (and its frankness continued to make fresh enemies) its readers increased. It was imitated, parodied, reviled as "a piece of yellow journalism"; it was hailed as "an American

Comédie Humaine." Finally, after the storm of controversy, it has taken its place as a landmark in American literature.

With Spoon River Anthology Masters arrived—and left. He went back to his first rhetorical style, resurrecting many of his earlier trifles, reprinting dull echoes of Tennyson, imitations of Shelley, archaic paraphrases in the manner of Swinburne. Yet though none of Masters' subsequent volumes can be compared to his masterpiece, all of them contain passages of the same straightforwardness and the stubborn searching that intensified his best-known characterizations.

Songs and Satires (1916) includes the startling "All Life in a Life" and the gravely moving "Silence." The Great Valley (1917) is packed with echoes and a growing dependence on Browning. In Toward the Gulf (1918), the Browning influence predominates. Starved Rock (1919), Domesday Book (1920) and The New Spoon River (1924) are queerly assembled mixtures of good, bad, and derivative verse. These volumes prepared us for the novels which, in their mixture of sharp concept and dull writing, were as uneven as his verse. The Fate of the Jury (1929) is a continuation of Domesday Book with its mechanics suggested by The Ring and the Book, large in outline, feeble in detail. Godbey (1931) is a dramatic poem containing six thousand lines of rhymed verse with a few sharply projected ideas, an occasionally vivid scene, and literally thousands of pedestrian couplets given over to debate and diatribe. Invisible Landscapes (1935) contains several ambitious poems devoted to varying manifestations of Nature, but they are impressive chiefly in length. One has only to compare Masters' "Hymn to Earth" with Elinor Wylie's poem of the same title to realize the difference between clairvoyance and doggedness.

Between 1935 and 1938 Masters was more prolific than ever. In less than three years he published a long autobiography, a novel, three biographies, three books of poems-eight volumes of declining merit. One of them, The New World (1937), was a quasi-epic which attempted to synthesize history and philosophy, law and literature. Poems of People (1936) was the best of the six; it marked a return to Masters' power of characterization plus a wider range than he had ever accomplished. The manner was equally varied, alternating from the gracefully lyrical "Week-End by the Sea" to the deeply etched "Widows," which contrasts the women living in "forsakeness and listless ease" with their menial sisters.

More People (1939) again reveals Masters as a grim historian of American life, lonely and bitter, but frequently turning the minutiae of history into poetry. The prairie section where Masters was born and where he grew up is spread out in the indigenous Illinois Poems (1941), in which the poet demonstrates his early environment and his late nostalgia. In spite of his repetitions and rhetoric, Masters' work is a continual if irritable quest for some key to the mystery of truth and the mastery of life. And there is always that milestone, the original Spoon River Anthology.

WEEK-END BY THE SEA

I

Far off the sea is gray and still as the sky,

Great waves roar to the shore like conch shells water-groined.

With a flapping coat I step, brace back as the wind drags by;
No ship as far as the seam where the sea and the sky are joined.

I am watched from the hotel, I think. Who faces the cold?
Why does he walk alone? "Tis a bitter day.

But I trade dreams with the sea, for the sea is old,

And knows the dreams of a heart whose dreams are gray.

Two apple trees alone in the waste on a sandy ledge,

Grappled and woven together with sprouts in a blackened mesh,
They are dead almost at the roots, but nourish the sedge;
They are dead and at truce, like souls of outlived flesh.

I have startled a gull to flight. I thought him a wave:

White of his wings seemed foam, breast hued like the sand-hued roll. When a part of the sea takes wing you would think that the grave

Of dead days might release to the heights a soul.

II

I slept as the day was ending: scarlet and gilt
Behind the Japan screen of shrubs and trees.

I awoke to the scabbard of night and the starry hilt
Of the sunken sun, to the old unease.

Sleeping, a void in my heart is awake;

Waking, there is the moon and the wind's moan.
I would I were as the sea that can break
Over the rocks, indifferent and alone.

III

I have climbed to the little burial plot of the lost
In wrecks at sea. West of me lies the town.
Below are the apple trees, pulling each other down.
Children are romping to school, ruddy from frost.

How the wind grieves around these weedy wisps,

And shakes them like a dog, sniffing from patch to patch.
I try the battered gate, lift up the latch,

And enter where the grass like a thistle lisps.

Lost at sea! Nothing thought out or planned!

What need? Thought enough in a moment that battles a wave!

What words tell more? And where is the hand to 'grave

Words that tell so much for the lost on land?

WIDOWS

For twenty years and more surviving after

Their husbands have been hidden away,

Gray, old, thin, or obese, day after day.

Pillowed in luxury, waking with quavering laughter

From the drowsiness of midday food,

They sit, fingering long strands of crystals,

Reading a little in a waking mood;

Or waiting for the postman with epistles,
Or for telephones, or callers coming to tea.
Bonds, stocks, are theirs; or pensions it may be,
Since the long-dead husband, under-salaried,
Helped to subdue some barbarous isle;

Now that he lies with the half-forgotten dead,
His widow draws an honorarium,
To prop her prestige yet a little while.
The public treasury is rich, and feels
The drain but little; yet it is a sum

Which would relieve the anxious mind whose zeals
For thought and progress dread the time to come.

In the hives of all the cities, high above
The smoke and noise, where the air is pure,
Are numberless widows, comfortable and secure,
Protected by the watchman and God's love;
Saved by the Church, and by the lawyer served,
And by the actor, dancer, novelist amused.

Some practise poetry; some, who are younger nerved,
Dabble in sculpture; but all are used

To win the attention of celebrities

At dinners, or at the opera, to imbibe

The high vitality of purchased devotees.

But when not modeling, or scribbling verse,

Nor drinking tea, nor tottering forth to dine,

They sit concocting some new bribe

To life for soul relief; they count what's in their purse;

They stare at the window half asleep from wine

Or poppy juice; they wait the luncheon hour;

They visit with their maids; or they receive

The heads of research schools, the which they dower,
Or magazines, the better to achieve

A place in memory or a present power;
Or out of social bitterness they dictate
The policies of journals, and compel
Adherence to their husbands' inveterate
Violence, like souls that brood in hell.

From rents and funds, prescriptions, old mortmains
They gather with fingers brown from moldy spots
Exhaustless gold, with which they feed the veins
Of palsied privilege, and they foil the plots
Of living generations against the dying brains.

The hives of all the cities are full of these
Widows, who in a complexity of combs
Live in forsakeness and listless ease:

All is deserted about them in such homes.

Long has the rain fallen, and the snow been piled

On the man under the trees outdoors;

Even the bones in granite domiciled

Have fallen apart-but still the widow sits