I Eat Poetry

Petit, The Poet

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel--
Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens--
But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Ballades by the score with the same old thought:
The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;
And what is love but a rose that fades?
Life all around me here in the village:
Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth,
Courage, constancy, heroism, failure--
All in the loom, and oh what patterns!
Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers--
Blind to all of it all my life long.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,
While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?

Masters, Edgar Lee. 1915. From Spoon River Anthology.

Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950) was an American poet and novelist best known for his Spoon River Anthology, which was based on the idea of composing a similar series of free-verse epitaphs in the form of monologues. In this work, the personas (speakers) of the poems are the dead of a community called Spoon River who speak from the grave to bemoan their lives lived in vain and to curse the town.

Although Masters continued to write after this work, he was unable to write his way past his initial fame, acknowledged in the title of his 1936 autobiography "Across Spoon River."