RPO -- Edgar Lee Masters : Seth Compton

Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950)

Seth Compton

1When I died, the circulating library

2Which I built up for Spoon River,

3And managed for the good of inquiring minds,

4Was sold at auction on the public square,

5As if to destroy the last vestige

6Of my memory and influence.

7For those of you who could not see the virtue

8Of knowing Volney's "Ruins" as well as Butler's "Analogy"

9And "Faust" as well as "Evangeline,"

10Were really the power in the village,

11And often you asked me,

12"What is the use of knowing the evil in the world?"

13I am out of your way now, Spoon River,

14Choose your own good and call it good.

15For I could never make you see

16That no one knows what is good

17Who knows not what is evil;

18And no one knows what is true

19Who knows not what is false.

Notes

8] The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires (1791) by Constantin Francois Volney (1757-1820), a free-thinking study; and Analogy of Religion (1736) by Joseph Butler (1692-1752).

9] Goethe's Faust (1834) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline (1847): poems about, respectively, boundless ambition and unhappy love.

Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.

Original text: Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology, illustrated by Oliver Herford (London: T. Werner Laurie, [1916]): 176. 8-NBI Masters New York Public Library
First publication date: 1915
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: 2003
Recent editing: 1:2003/6/2

Rhyme: unrhyming

Other poems by Edgar Lee Masters