Edgar Lee Masters’ speaker in “Aner Clute” compares her choosing “the life” to a boy stealing an apple from a grocery store.
Introduction and Text of “Aner Clute”
In Edgar Lee Masters’ “Aner Clute,” from Spoon River Anthology, the speaker is a prostitute, who blames others for her own life choices, as many of the Spoon River soliloquists are wont to do.
The bulk of Aner Clute’s drama plays out in her comparison of her choosing “the life” to a boy stealing an apple from a grocery store. Like many other Spoon River speakers, Miss Clute dabbles in a ridiculous fantasy designed solely to relieve her of her own guilty life choices.
Aner Clute
Over and over they used to ask me, While buying the wine or the beer, In Peoria first, and later in Chicago, Denver, Frisco, New York, wherever I lived, How I happened to lead the life, And what was the start of it. Well, I told them a silk dress, And a promise of marriage from a rich man— (It was Lucius Atherton). But that was not really it at all. Suppose a boy steals an apple From the tray at the grocery store, And they all begin to call him a thief, The editor, minister, judge, and all the people— “A thief,” “a thief,” “a thief,” wherever he goes. And he can’t get work, and he can’t get bread Without stealing it, why the boy will steal. It’s the way the people regard the theft of the apple That makes the boy what he is.
Commentary on “Aner Clute”
Edgar Lee Masters’ speaker in “Aner Clute” compares her choosing “the life” to a boy stealing an apple from a grocery store.
First Movement: Getting into “The Life”
Over and over they used to ask me, While buying the wine or the beer, In Peoria first, and later in Chicago, Denver, Frisco, New York, wherever I lived, How I happened to lead the life, And what was the start of it.
Aner begins her drama by reporting that her johns (customers of a prostitute) would ask her how she got into “the life,” which is a euphemism for prostitution. They supposedly wanted to know “what was the start of it.”
These johns in Peoria, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, New York, or “wherever [she] lived” would put these questions to her as they were “buying the wine or the beer.”
No doubt, they asked not so much because they cared how she became a “working girl,” but likely just to have something to say. They probably had little else in common with their companion for the night, and such a question would seem personal enough yet non-intimidating.
Second Movement: Blame it on a Dress and a Promise
Well, I told them a silk dress, And a promise of marriage from a rich man— (It was Lucius Atherton).
Aner claims she would tell them she got into the business because of “a silk dress, / And a promise of marriage from a rich man.” She even names the man, Lucius Atherton.
Third Movement: A Lie and Ludicrous Comparison
But that was not really it at all. Suppose a boy steals an apple From the tray at the grocery store, And they all begin to call him a thief, The editor, minister, judge, and all the people—
Aner then admits that her claim about the marriage promise and the silk dress was a lie, and she begins a ludicrous comparison of her choice to sell sex for a living to a boy stealing an apple from a grocery store. Clute’s pitiful plaint is that “the editor, minister, judge, and all the people” took up the refrain of calling the boy “a thief.”
Fourth Movement: The Label Makes the Man
“A thief,” “a thief,” “a thief,” wherever he goes. And he can’t get work, and he can’t get bread Without stealing it, why the boy will steal. It’s the way the people regard the theft of the apple That makes the boy what he is.
Clute continues her analogy and chorus of “all the people” calling the boy, “A thief,” “a thief,” “a thief.” Everywhere the poor lad goes someone calls him a thief. The boy’s reputation as a thief prevents the boy from finding any job. He cannot even supply his own meals, so the boy can do only one thing—continue to steal.
According to Aner, the boy’s predicament was not engendered by the boy stealing an apple; his life as a thief resulted from “the way the people regard the theft of the apple.” Their heartless taunting “ma[de] the boy what he is.”
The reason that Aner’s analogy to the boy-turned-thief sounds utterly asinine is because it is. She is implying that because she took money once for sex, she had to continue because everywhere she went, people would call her names like whore, slut, slattern or whatever.
So Aner’s difficulty was not her own making. Her downfall was having other people label her a whore that made her actually become a prostitute. Such is the convoluted thinking of many of these Spoon River cemetery inmates. They are never to blame for their choices—they blame society in the town of Spoon River.
Image: Emily Dickinson – Amherst College – Daguerrotype of the poet at age 17, circa 1847 – likely the only authentic, extant likeness of the poet
Emily Dickinson’s “Like her the Saints retire”
In Emily Dickinson’s “Like her the Saints retire,” the speaker likens a departed woman to retiring saints, sunset colors, and reasoning flowers, suggesting that death cannot erase her presence.
Introduction and Text of “Like her the Saints retire”
In “Like her the Saints retire,” the speaker muses on the death of a woman by comparing her to three things that seem to vanish yet do not entirely disappear: sainted souls, evening light, and autumn blossoms. Through this triad, the speaker questions whether “departed” truly means gone.
Like her the Saints retire
Like her the Saints retire, In their Chapeaux of fire, Martial as she!
Like her the Evenings steal Purple and Cochineal After the Day!
“Departed” – both – they say! i.e. gathered away, Not found,
Argues the Aster still – Reasons the Daffodil Profound!
Commentary on “Like her the Saints retire”
The speaker is building a quiet argument that departure is not extinction, using saints, sunsets, and flowers as three witnesses.
First Stanza: “Like her the Saints retire”
Like her the Saints retire, In their Chapeaux of fire, Martial as she!
The speaker opens by comparing the departed woman to saints who “retire” in “Chapeaux of fire.” The image suggests crowned or haloed figures withdrawing from earthly view, not annihilated but transformed, still blazing with a fire that outlasts the body.
Paramahansa Yogananda explains that consciousness is indestructible and survives the body’s dissolution, a teaching he offers in his reflections on immortality. This idea illuminates the speaker’s saints, whose retirement is glorification, not erasure.
The final word of the stanza, “Martial,” casts the woman as a soldier facing her end with discipline and courage. She withdraws the way a warrior withdraws from a field already won, not defeated but simply finished with the visible battle.
In my earlier commentaries on Dickinson’s poems, I have discussed the speaker’s focus on inner spiritual insight over outer material existence. Here, the saints’ unseen fire operates the same way, hinting at a glory hidden from ordinary sight.
By pairing sainthood with martial bearing, the speaker refuses to let death be accepted merely as defeat. The woman joins a ceremonial company that only appears to leave, its true condition burning quietly beyond the reach of mourners’ eyes.
Second Stanza: “Like her the Evenings steal”
Like her the Evenings steal Purple and Cochineal After the Day!
The speaker’s second comparison turns from saints to sunsets. Evenings “steal” purple and cochineal, a vivid red dye color, after daylight ends. The verb “steal” implies theft, a departure that removes color from view without destroying it.
Cochineal, drawn from crushed insects, was a costly, richly saturated pigment. By naming it precisely, the speaker insists the vanishing light was not pale or ordinary but sumptuous, worth grieving precisely because it was so richly hued before it withdrew.
The evening does not annihilate purple and cochineal; it simply removes them from present sight, folding them into night’s storehouse. This mirrors the woman’s death, framed not as loss of being but as a temporary withdrawal from visibility.
In my earlier essays on Dickinsonian poems, I have discussed the speaker’s confidence in a world where beauty persists beyond ordinary sight. The stolen colors of evening function the same way here, hidden rather than destroyed.
The stanza’s exclamation mark, “After the Day!” lends the moment ceremonial weight, as though sunset were a formal exit rather than a fading. The woman’s departure, like the evening’s theft of color, becomes a dignified withdrawal, not a diminishment.
Third Stanza: “‘Departed’ – both – they say!”
“Departed” – both – they say! i.e. gathered away, Not found,
The speaker now names the shared verdict spoken over both the woman and the evening: “Departed.” The quotation marks signal skepticism, as though the speaker distrusts the word’s finality, treating it as common report rather than settled truth.
The gloss “i.e. gathered away” softens departure into something gentler than loss, an image of collection rather than destruction. Something gathered still exists somewhere, merely relocated beyond the reach of searching eyes.
“Not found” completes the thought with quiet insistence: absence from view is not proof of nonexistence. The speaker distinguishes carefully between what cannot presently be located and what has ceased to be.
Paramahansa Yogananda teaches that death is not extinction but a passing beyond present perception, a truth he sets forth in his teachings on loss. This view sharpens the speaker’s careful wording.
By refusing the word “departed” as full authority, the speaker builds her quiet case: what “they say” is only the surface report. Something gathered away and not found may yet remain, intact, elsewhere.
Fourth Stanza: “Argues the Aster still”
Argues the Aster still – Reasons the Daffodil Profound!
The speaker closes by calling two flowers as witnesses. The Aster, a late-season bloom, “argues still,” continuing its case for persistence even as autumn advances toward apparent ending. Its stubborn flowering counters the report of departure.
The Daffodil, a spring flower absent from the scene, is said to “reason,” and its reasoning is called “Profound.” Though unseen in this season, its eventual return each year offers evidence that vanished things resume, cyclically, undefeated by winter.
Together the two flowers form a natural argument against finality. One insists in the present tense; the other, though absent now, carries a deeper, patterned proof rooted in nature’s recurring seasons rather than momentary appearance.
The character, Willard Fluke, is spared an ignominious confession but at a great price.
Introduction and Text of “Willard Fluke”
Edgar Lee Masters’ “Willard Fluke” from his American classic Spoon River Anthology is the name of the father of “Lois Spears,” the blind woman whose simple purity serves as a welcome cleansing after interacting with the many unsavory speakers the reader meets in this anthology.
Willard Fluke
My wife lost her health, And dwindled until she weighed scarce ninety pounds. Then that woman, whom the men Styled Cleopatra, came along. And we—we married ones All broke our vows, myself among the rest. Years passed and one by one Death claimed them all in some hideous form, And I was borne along by dreams Of God’s particular grace for me, And I began to write, write, write, reams on reams Of the second coming of Christ. Then Christ came to me and said, “Go into the church and stand before the congregation And confess your sin.” But just as I stood up and began to speak I saw my little girl, who was sitting in the front seat— My little girl who was born blind! After that, all is blackness!
Commentary on“Willard Fluke”
The character, Willard Fluke, is spared an ignominious confession but at a great price.
First Movement: The Sick Wife
My wife lost her health, And dwindled until she weighed scarce ninety pounds. Then that woman, whom the men Styled Cleopatra, came along. And we—we married ones All broke our vows, myself among the rest.
Willard begins by reporting about his wife, who “lost her health.” His wife lost so much weight that she “weighed scare ninety pounds.” Willard does not reveal the nature of his wife’s affliction—just that this loss of her health apparently triggered breaking of his marital vows, after “that woman, whom the men / Styled Cleopatra, came along.”
Along with the other men, Willard succumbs to temptation with the woman they “styled Cleopatra.” He allows the reader to draw the appropriate conclusions about the temptress because his only point is that he sinned through his weakness.
Second Movement: Time Flies
Years passed and one by one Death claimed them all in some hideous form, And I was borne along by dreams Of God’s particular grace for me, And I began to write, write, write, reams on reams Of the second coming of Christ.
Time fled by as it is wont to do, and all the men involved with the cleopatrian temptress died one by one in “some hideous form.” Willard was strangely motivated to write about “the second coming of Christ.” He wrote “reams on reams.” Spurred on by guilt, trying desperately to save his soul, he used his writing is an alternative to meditation.
Willard stresses that he was “borne along by dreams / Of God’s particular grace for [him].” Because he placed his mind so squarely on God, he was motivated to write those reams. His dreaming and writing served him as a form of worship.
Third Movement: A Visitation
Then Christ came to me and said, “Go into the church and stand before the congregation And confess your sin.”
Through Willard’s concentration on God’s grace and intense relationship with Christ in writing about the second coming, Willard so prepared his soul for a visit from the Savior.
When Christ did honor Willard with a visitation, the Savior advised Willard to “confess [his] sin” “before the congregation.” Willard was admonished to stand before the entire church and admit his sin.
The reader will note that Willard says “sin”—not sins. This designation indicates that it is only the one adulterous sin that has rifled his life—only that one sin that motivated him to concentrate on God and write reams for Jesus. It, of course, was a great sin, and Willard has taken it very seriously as tries to wipe it from his karma.
Fourth Movement: Delivered by Death?
But just as I stood up and began to speak I saw my little girl, who was sitting in the front seat— My little girl who was born blind! After that, all is blackness!
Willard attempts to obey Christ’s demand that he confess before the church; however, as Willard stands and begins to speak, he sees Lois, his little girl, “who was born blind!” At that point, we lose Willard, who simply reports, “After that, all is blackness!”
The reader may understand only that Willard fainted before he was able to confess. But then the reader is left wondering if Willard also died at this point. The possibility is great because Willard obviously has taken on guilt for Lois’ blindness. He has suffered for a lifetime, and quite possibly his heart just gave out before he could confess.
If Willard did die at this point, the reader may interpret his death as God’s mercy because Willard did not have to endure the ignominy of confessing his sin to the church but was spared just as Abraham was spared of sacrificing his son, Isaac; that confession would have hurt his little blind daughter, but she, too, was spared.
Unbuckled pride strains credulity On cinder blocks in the rain— Profit the man of steel Whose chalk mentality scratches Gold flecks of a summer night. Blank as the dank posted willows That slum the crum tide leeching The verbiage of metaphor walking Like sticks stuck down by the tracks.
In the brain waves of goats, they look For crystalline stalactites, But thiamine quelled the stretch As the Man of Steel hovered The neighborhood and plunged Into the hypocrisy of postmodern wit. Narrowing a brow, lifting a finger, Touting the untoutable, scraping The wilderness out of a circus town.
Night closes ultimately and Whimsy may fade But Dr. Frankenstink will cozy up to her lost foot As long as grapevines tangle on the waste land. Neither past nor future calls his name, and no island Brings comfort as much as departure without infamy. He left no logical heir to fan the flames of his poetry— That dust-drilled style of poetry that everybody reads Until morning echoes in the bottom of a bucket. Run on, Soul of the Man of Steel, to heaven’s loft.
Image: Emily Dickinson – Amherst College – Daguerrotype of the poet at age 17, circa 1847 – likely the only authentic, extant likeness of the poet
Emily Dickinson’s “A little East of Jordan”
Emily Dickinson’s “A little East of Jordan” dramatizes the speaker’s retelling of Jacob’s wrestling match with the angel, transforming a familiar Genesis episode into a study of stubborn, victorious will.
Introduction and Text of “A little East of Jordan”
In “A little East of Jordan,” the speaker reimagines the KJV Genesis 32: 1–32 wrestling match between Jacob and the angel as an athletic contest, casting the angel as a “Gymnast” who ultimately loses to the mortal’s persistence. The speaker’s playful diction transforms sacred narrative into a witty demonstration of the power of unyielding will.
A little East of Jordan
A little East of Jordan, Evangelists record, A Gymnast and an Angel Did wrestle long and hard –
Till morning touching mountain – And Jacob, waxing strong, The Angel begged permission To Breakfast – to return –
Not so, said cunning Jacob! “I will not let thee go Except thou bless me” – Stranger! The which acceded to –
Light swung the silver fleeces “Peniel” Hills beyond, And the bewildered Gymnast Found he had worsted God!
Commentary on “A little East of Jordan”
The speaker recasts a solemn biblical account as a spirited contest, using wit to explore how persistence itself becomes a spiritual discipline capable of overturning even divine resistance.
First Stanza: “A little East of Jordan”
A little East of Jordan, Evangelists record, A Gymnast and an Angel Did wrestle long and hard –
The speaker opens by locating the scene precisely, “a little East of Jordan,” grounding a supernatural encounter in geography familiar to any reader of scripture. The phrase “Evangelists record” signals that the speaker relies on inherited testimony rather than firsthand witness.
Naming the angel a “Gymnast” is the speaker’s first great irreverence. The lofty biblical wrestler becomes an athlete, a figure of muscle and technique rather than pure spirit. This diction lowers the encounter to human scale even while its outcome remains cosmically divine.
The verb “wrestle” and the adverbial pairing “long and hard” emphasize duration and effort. The speaker insists that this contest was no brief skirmish but a sustained trial, foreshadowing that endurance, not strength alone, will determine the victor.
Paramahansa Yogananda explains that persistence carries its own guarantee of fulfillment: “When you persist, refusing to accept failure, the object of will must materialize.” Jacob’s marathon struggle embodies this very principle of sustained, unrelenting will.
In my earlier essays on Dickinsonian poems, I have discussed the speaker’s habit of privileging inner evidence over public display, a habit already visible here in her quiet trust that private struggle yields real spiritual gain.
Second Stanza “Till morning touching mountain”
Till morning touching mountain – And Jacob, waxing strong, The Angel begged permission To Breakfast – to return –
The stanza opens with a striking image, morning itself “touching mountain,” as though dawn were a physical presence arriving to interrupt the combat. Time becomes tactile, marking the passage of an entire night spent in struggle.
Jacob, meanwhile, is “waxing strong,” a phrase borrowed almost directly from scripture yet given new emphasis by the speaker’s placement. Rather than weakening under supernatural assault, the human contestant grows more powerful as the hours pass.
The reversal culminates in the angel’s request: it “begged permission / To Breakfast – to return.” The heavenly being now pleads with the mortal, reduced to requesting release for so mundane a purpose as a meal.
This comic deflation, an angel wanting breakfast, allows the speaker to needle at solemn religious authority while never abandoning the story’s essential gravity. The sacred and the domestic collide, and neither cancels the other.
The speaker’s contemplative musing on this exchange suggests that true power resides not alone in supernatural station but in the will to endure until dawn, a lesson equally applicable to any poet’s own persistent labor.
Third Stanza: “Not so, said cunning Jacob!”
Not so, said cunning Jacob! “I will not let thee go Except thou bless me” – Stranger! The which acceded to –
Jacob’s refusal arrives as direct speech, the poem’s only moment of quoted dialogue. Calling him “cunning” credits the patriarch with strategy rather than mere stubbornness; he recognizes leverage and refuses to relinquish it.
The demand “I will not let thee go / Except thou bless me” reproduces the biblical ultimatum nearly verbatim, yet the speaker’s surrounding commentary, calling the angel “Stranger,” reminds readers that Jacob himself does not yet know with whom he grapples.
That the angel simply “acceded” without further struggle marks the turning point. Divine resistance yields not to force but to a condition, a bargain struck between unequal parties in which the lesser somehow commands the terms.
The speaker’s compression here, four short lines carrying the whole negotiation, mirrors the suddenness of surrender itself. What took a night to accomplish through physical struggle resolves in a single spoken sentence.
Such a bargain illustrates a spiritual economy in which blessing must be actively claimed rather than passively awaited, a principle the speaker elsewhere applies to the poet’s own claims upon poetic immortality.
Fourth Stanza: “Light swung the silver fleeces”
Light swung the silver fleeces “Peniel” Hills beyond, And the bewildered Gymnast Found he had worsted God!
The final stanza opens with an image of dawn clouds, “silver fleeces” swinging with light, a pastoral softness that contrasts sharply with the night’s violence. Nature itself seems to exhale after the long contest concludes.
Naming “Peniel” anchors the scene to its scriptural source, the place where Jacob declares he has seen God face to face. The speaker trusts her reader to recognize the allusion without further explanation, letting the place-name carry its full theological weight.
The angel returns as “bewildered Gymnast,” a phrase that closes the poem’s athletic conceit even as it reveals the being’s astonishment. Losing was never anticipated; the contest’s outcome upends the expected hierarchy between mortal and messenger.
The closing line, “Found he had worsted God,” delivers the poem’s central audacity. The speaker allows the possibility that Jacob’s opponent was divinity itself, and that a mortal, through sheer refusal to release his grip, defeated that divinity.
In my earlier essays on Dickinsonian poems, I have discussed the speaker’s fondness for such theological daring, moments where scripture becomes raw material for testing the boundaries between human will and heavenly authority.
The poem finally suggests that blessing is not simply granted from above but wrested through persistent, even cunning, engagement, a conclusion the speaker offers with characteristic wit rather than solemnity.
Dispelling Postmodern Critical Misreading of Dickinson’s “A little East of Jordan”
Postmodern critics like to argue that Emily Dickinson’s poetry exhibits atheistic tendencies that match their own. Some mask that their claim by calling her “pagan” even using her own hyperbolic and metaphoric claims for support. Others use equally fabulous reasoning to spout their misunderstanding, such as the following exampleshereandhere.
Emily Dickinson’s “A little East of Jordan” is not an atheist text; it is a vivid dramatization of intimate, embodied encounter between the human and the divine.
Far from denying God’s reality or relevance, the poem insists on the nearness of God to His struggling children and on the possibility that persistent human will can wrest blessing from that nearness.
The poem retells KJV Genesis 32: the night-long wrestling of Jacob with the mysterious figure who is finally recognized as God (or God’s messenger). Dickinson’s speaker does not demythologize the episode or reduce it to psychology.
She keeps the biblical geography (“A little East of Jordan”), the scriptural testimony (“Evangelists record”), the place-name Peniel, and the decisive demand for blessing.
The diction is playful—“Gymnast,” “Breakfast,” “cunning Jacob,” “bewildered Gymnast”—but the playfulness is the Dickinsonian mode of seriousness: she lowers the sublime just enough to make the encounter tactile and human-scale without emptying it of its theological weight.
An atheist reading that seizes on the final line (“Found he had worsted God!”) as evidence of divine defeat or absence simply misreads the tone and the tradition. In the biblical narrative, and in Dickinson’s recasting of it, Jacob does not overthrow God; he clings until God yields a blessing.
The “worsting” is the paradoxical victory of the lesser over the greater that is possible only because the greater has drawn near and allowed itself to be held. As Paramahansa Yogananda explains, God can be captured by love.
That nearness is the poem’s central affirmation. Jacob does not pray at a distance or receive an abstract revelation. He grapples through the night with a bodily presence; dawn itself becomes a participant (“morning touching mountain”); the angel must ask permission to leave.
And the human will refuses release “Except thou bless me.” The divine is not remote, impersonal, or optional. It is close enough to be seized, resisted, and finally forced into a covenant of blessing.
Dickinson’s Jacob is “cunning” and “waxing strong,” yet the strength is exercised against and with the divine antagonist. The outcome is not the vanishing of God but the disclosure that God can be engaged, that blessing is not merely bestowed from on high but can be claimed in the struggle itself.
This situation produces a belief system that remains the opposite of atheism. Atheism declares there is no one to wrestle with. Dickinson’s poem shows a God so present that a mortal can refuse to let Him go.
In my commentary on this poem, I have noted the poem’s transformation of solemn narrative into athletic contest and its interest in “stubborn, victorious will.” That will, however, is not autonomous or self-sufficient; it operates inside a relationship that the poem never dissolves.
The angel’s bewilderment and the final recognition that the opponent was God do not mock divinity; they underline the astonishing intimacy of the encounter.
Dickinson’s characteristic theological daring—treating scripture as living material rather than sealed authority—does not erase God; it tests the boundaries of human access to Him and finds those boundaries permeable.
Persistence becomes a spiritual discipline precisely because there is a real Divine Presence against which (and with which) persistence can act.
In short, the poem does not argue that God is absent or irrelevant. It stages the closeness of God to His fallen children: a God who can be met in the dark, held until morning, and compelled by human tenacity to bestow a name and a blessing.
That belief system is not atheism, agnosticism, or even paganism. It is a fierce, witty, and deeply theistic vision of divine-human encounter that expresses deep spiritual conviction that God is real and knowable.
Some dreams signal ghastly deeds In past lives; likely, we prefer Not to be reminded. The exorcism Of karmic fire offers the only cleansing.
Some dream ghosts you grasp: your mother’s Broken heart healed, your public nakedness, robbers Breaking down the door.
But this one recurs and baffles your equilibrium. It is an invasion corrupting your private heart: The one who baffles you
Is neither a father nor a God figure, Just a former acquaintance you never knew well And never touched (at least in this life).
Nor do you touch in the dream, except innocently, Informally, though some strong emotion seems to float Beneath the surface of dream skin.
In your society of thoughts, you flesh out reasons For this intrusion: a past life, too dim to remember, Gives the only succor, as you await enlightenment.
Trying to neutralize resentment, jealousy, or betrayal, Your subconscious may be accusing, judging, condemning, But for what you remain unaware.
Each visit of the form reshapes your conscience And the day crawls on its belly: You feel a sick-sweet love
Coiling and spurning itself until you forget again And get on with other details, but give it days or weeks And the phantom reappears.
It begs exorcism: Burning karmic seeds to release The ghost in smoke. You hope this specter is free of you— You prefer to think this aberration is yours alone.
Original poem appearing in my collection titled “Turtle Woman & Other Poems” under the title “Aberration”
The epitaph and character of “Lois Spears” will delight readers who have grown somewhat jaded with the jaded characters offered them in Masters’ Spoon River Anthology.
Introduction and Text of “Lois Spears”
Edgar Lee Masters’ “Lois Spears” from American classic Spoon River Anthology surprises readers with its simple purity. The many complaints from those who pursued lives on the seamy side and then tried to blame others for their misfortunes resonant with such volume that encountering a soul such as Lois provides a shock albeit a pleasant one.
This poem features only three movements. The first movement’s opening sounds as if a third party is reporting for Lois, but then it becomes clear that it is Lois speaking in the last parenthetical line.
It is also important to note that the information in the parenthetical is deemphasized, though for the world it is of great moment. The second movement finds Lois proclaiming herself “the happiest of women,” while the third and final movement reveals the reason for her height of happiness.
Lois Spears
Here lies the body of Lois Spears, Born Lois Fluke, daughter of Willard Fluke, Wife of Cyrus Spears, Mother of Myrtle and Virgil Spears, Children with clear eyes and sound limbs— (I was born blind). I was the happiest of women As wife, mother and housekeeper, Caring for my loved ones, And making my home A place of order and bounteous hospitality: For I went about the rooms, And about the garden With an instinct as sure as sight, As though there were eyes in my finger tips— Glory to God in the highest.
Commentary on “Lois Spears”
Edgar Lee Master’ epitaph “Lois Spears” will be a welcome delight to readers who have grown somewhat annoyed with the jaded characters offered them in the American classic Spoon River Anthology.
First Movement: Official Announcement
Here lies the body of Lois Spears, Born Lois Fluke, daughter of Willard Fluke, Wife of Cyrus Spears, Mother of Myrtle and Virgil Spears, Children with clear eyes and sound limbs— (I was born blind).
Lois begins her report with a rather official sounding declaration, “Here lies the body of Lois Spears.” She continues by identifying herself further with her maiden name, “Lois Fluke,” and that she was the “daughter of Willard Fluke.”
The significance of her maiden name becomes apparent as the reader encounters the strange, delightful character she exhibits. She is, indeed, a fluke of nature, especially when found among the many disingenuous and shady characters of Spoon River.
Lois further defines her identity by stating that she was the wife of “Cyrus Spears, / Mother of Myrtle and Virgil Spears.” Her children, she is no doubt happy to report, both had “clear eyes”—they were not born with the same affliction that their mother had to endure.
Her children, furthermore, were otherwise healthy with “sound limbs.” It is only after Lois has revealed the rudimentary biographical facts that she imparts the crucial information that she “was born blind.”
Second Movement: No Need for Pity
I was the happiest of women As wife, mother and housekeeper, Caring for my loved ones, And making my home A place of order and bounteous hospitality:
Lest her hearers begin to pity her, Lois immediately dispels the notion that she requires any by declaring herself, “the happiest of women.” She was so happy because she cared for her “loved ones” and made her home “a place of order and bounteous hospitality.”
The magnanimity of such a remark offers solace to all who have struggled with positions that they deem beneath them—the lowly housewife, who was also blind, was able to function as the happiest of women simply by nurturing and making a home for her loved ones.
Third Movement: All Glory to God
For I went about the rooms, And about the garden With an instinct as sure as sight, As though there were eyes in my finger tips— Glory to God in the highest.
In the final movement, Lois proclaims that all glory belongs to “God in the highest.” Lois was able to go about the rooms of her home and even grow a garden and claims she did so “with instinct as sure as sight.”
Lois Spears worked and achieved high accomplishments “[a]s though there were eyes in [her] finger tips.” That Mrs. Spears praises the Divine for her happy fluke of a life lifts her capital to further heights. Mrs. Lois Spears takes her rank as one of the fine, pure souls who inhabited the otherwise carping village of Spoon River.
Some dream ghosts whisk by nearly unremarkable: No broken hearts, no public nudity, no murderers Closing in on your heels, just puppies and ice cream,
While others baffle and throw you off kilter. They invade, painting you in a scene You would never have willingly entered.
Why should you couple with this one For whom you have no attraction in the light of day? Who seems to walk out of some distant past
Entering the space occupied by another— Recognized, yet unrecognized, in this dream-mare? Karma is sometimes a bitch that barks at you
And other times growls, trying to get your attention You suppose, but for what purpose? You know you have seeds to burn. You know you could
Have been coupled in a past life. But why Are you forced to revisit it now against your will? Oh, you do know dreams come to you against your will.
You may enjoy some, scorn others; still, they come Spewing forth from the old memory hole. Life is a series of lessons; you have learned that much
From God and experience. You can control What you do with your eyes open, but when you close them And try to rest that brain and its soldiers, you would
Have your rest be peaceful and unfettered by past Emotional, and possibly physical ties, that time And death and life again have broken—
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