Edgar Lee Masters' Lucinda Matlock
Wisdom for the Degenerates
Edgar Lee Masters’ famous Spoon River Anthology features little poetic narratives about people who have died. “Lucinda Matlock” is one of the most widely noted and anthologized poem from the series.
Masters’ poem consists of twenty continuous unrimed lines that may be sectioned by theme: early years, marriage, life’s work, commentary on life.
Early Years: “I went to the dances at Chandlerville”
The speaker, a woman who has died, gives a brief overview of her life; she begins by reporting that she attended “dances at Chandlerville, / And played snap-out at Winchester.” Snap-out is party game, in which the players sit in a ring; then one player stands up, runs around the ring, and taps another player who stands and chases the tapper with the attempt to overtake him before he can sit down again.
The speaker then recalls that once on a double date while driving home, the couples “changed partners” and that was the time that she met her future husband, Davis.
Marriage: “We were married and lived together for seventy years”
The speaker and Davis enjoyed a long life together, “seventy years.” She asserts that their life was filled with “[e]njoying, working, raising the twelve children.” Sadly, only four of their dozen children survived past the speaker’s sixtieth birthday.
She makes it clear that her marriage was strong and prosperous.
Life’s Work: “I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick”
The speaker describes her daily work: “I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick, / I made the garden.” But she also gives more space to dramatizing her playful activities.
She lived a pastoral life, quietly performing her household chores and then immersing herself in nature, from “[r]ambl[ing] over the fields” to collecting shells from the banks of “Spoon River” to picking flowers and “medicinal weed.”
At age ninety-six, she died, but she qualifies her death as just a natural departure after living all that she need to live. She has enjoyed life so thoroughly that she “had lived enough, that is all.” She had no regrets about dying because she had lived so well; thus, she “passed to a sweet repose.”
Commentary on Life: “What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness”
In her final statement, the speaker rebukes the “[d]egenerate sons and daughters” who are a bunch of whiners and misanthropes. She chastises them for their “sorrow and weariness, / Anger, discontent and drooping hopes.”
She does not coddle them or worry about their lack of self-esteem. She bluntly tells them, “Life is too strong for you— / It takes life to love Life.” She infers rightly from all the disproportionate negativity that these degenerates are weaklings, unfit and unable to love life because they lack the spine to live and love.
Edgar Lee Masters
|
More in Reading & Literature
Latest Articles