Over 200 characters are described in the free-verse graveyard poems that Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950) composed for his 1916 “Spoon River Anthology” — and most of them are grim accounts of a hardscrabble life. The Midwest, in Master’s fictionalized telling of legends and gossip from generations along the Spoon River in Illinois, was a place of small but fiercely held passions, quiet crimes, and life scraped by. Except for a few — notably Lucinda Matlock. From the grave, she looks back on her long life and wonders how anyone can complain about existence: “What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, / Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?” And in the famous conclusion, she warns, “Degenerate sons and daughters, / Life is too strong for you — / It takes life to love Life.”

Lucinda Matlock
by Edgar Lee Masters

I went to the dances at Chandlerville,
And played snap-out at Winchester.
One time we changed partners,
Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,
And then I found Davis.
We were married and lived together for seventy years,
Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,
Eight of whom we lost
Ere I had reached the age of sixty.
I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,
I made the garden, and for holiday
Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,
And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,
And many a flower and medicinal weed —
Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,
And passed to a sweet repose.
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you —
It takes life to love Life.