Edgar Lee Masters’  “Trainor, the Druggist”

Edgar Lee Master’  “Trainor, the Druggist”

Trainor, the Druggist, offers an additional perspective on the Pantier marriage.

Introduction and Text of “Trainor, the Druggist”

Edgar Lee Masters’ “Trainor, the Druggist” from Spoon River Anthology offers a final installment covering the pitiful story of the Pantiers:  Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Pantier and their son, Reuben. 

Trainor, the chemist/druggist, dramatizes his take on the Pantiers’ marriage as he philosophizes about how chemicals and personalities may combine to produce results unlike either of the components.

Trainor, the Druggist

Only the chemist can tell, and not always the chemist,
What will result from compounding
Fluids or solids.
And who can tell
How men and women will interact
On each other, or what children will result?
There were Benjamin Pantier and his wife,
Good in themselves, but evil toward each other:
He oxygen, she hydrogen,
Their son, a devastating fire.
I Trainor, the druggist, a mixer of chemicals,
Killed while making an experiment,
Lived unwedded.

Interpretive Reading of “Trainor the Druggist” 

Commentary on “Trainor, the Druggist”

Edgar Lee Masters just could not let go of the Pantiers; in “Trainor, the Druggist,” yet another and final installment focusing on the couple is offered.

First Movement:  Begins by Contradicting Himself

Only the chemist can tell, and not always the chemist,
What will result from compounding
Fluids or solids.

Trainor begins by remarking and somewhat contradicting himself about what a chemist can know.  He first states that “only” a chemist can know the results of combining certain substances, but he quickly adds that not even a chemist can “always” know the result of “compounding / Fluids and solids.”

By using the substances “fluids and solids,” Trainor avoids sounding overly esoteric and confusing in his statement, although later he settles on the use of “oxygen” and “hydrogen” to express the natures of the Pantiers.

Second Movement:  Who?  Indeed!

And who can tell
How men and women will interact
On each other, or what children will result?

Trainor then asks a rhetorical question, wondering who can ever predict how a certain man and a certain woman might react to their relationship.  He also wonders, “what children will result?”

Of course, no one can know how any given couple will eventually grow in a relationship, and the possibilities are endless, as are the possibilities of the kinds of children that might spring from any given relationship.  The chemist can know how certain chemicals will react with each, but even the chemist will have to admit that many combinations have yet to be tried.

Third Movement:  The Pantiers

There were Benjamin Pantier and his wife,
Good in themselves, but evil toward each other:
He oxygen, she hydrogen,
Their son, a devastating fire.

In the third movement, Trainor focuses on the Pantiers, concluding that each was “good in themselves.”  But when they were bound in a relationship, they were “evil toward each other.”

Trainor then likens Benjamin to “oxygen,” while Mrs. Benjamin was like “hydrogen.”  But the combination was, unfortunately, not in a useful proportion that would result, for example, in water; it was some combination that produces “fire.”  Trainor says, “Their son, a devastating fire.”

Fourth Movement:  Trainor, Somewhat Ditzy

I Trainor, the druggist, a mixer of chemicals,
Killed while making an experiment,
Lived unwedded.

In the final movement, the reader learns that Trainor was killed while “making an experiment.”  As a “mixer of chemicals,” Trainor turns out to be incompetent, but he reports that he “lived unwedded,” which, to Trainor’s way of thinking, gives him at least a measure of pride of achievement.

Of course, the reader will remember that Reuben Pantier turned his life around and was able to extinguish the “devastating fire” in himself—an eventuality that also underscores the incompetence of the druggist.

The Pantier Sequence

The five epigraphs that comprise the “Pantier Sequence”: 

1.  Benjamin Pantier  A husband who appears to be weakling allowing himself to be cowed by his wife, an arrogant bully.
2. Mrs. Benjamin Pantier  Unbridled arrogance, overweening vanity along with cowardly weakness have combined to bring about the destruction of the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Pantier.
3. Reuben Pantier  Reuben Pantier’s colorful character helps dramatize the power of spiritual love for healing the mind, heart, and soul, even through the distance of miles and decades.  Reuben is the son of the dysfunctional couple Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Pantier.
4. Emily Sparks  The epitaph is the fourth entry in the sequence of five epitaphs featuring a dysfunctional couple, their son, and the latter’s influential mentor.
5.  Trainor, the Druggist  This epitaph offers a final installment covering the pitiful story of the Pantiers:  Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Pantier and their son Reuben.