The long quiet section before the poem is me standing still, trying to keep a very large moose feeling calm and unthreatened. It must have worked, because he did not trample me, but wandered off in the opposite direction. Whoa, nelly: that was awesome in all senses of the word.
TEXT OF POEM"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.
Episode 4.17 Kay Ryan’s “This Life”
Episode 4.16 Three Poems by Stephen Crane
Episode 4.15 Wordsworth's "Lines Written in Early Spring"
Episode 4.14 Walter Scott’s “Innominatus”
Episode 4.13 Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain"
Episode 4.12 W. H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”
Episode 4.11 Jim Harrison’s “I Believe”
Episode 4.10 E. E. Cummings “sweet spring is your,” “old mr ly,” and “pity this busy monster,manunkind”
Episode 4.09 An Easter reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “A Nativity”
Episode 4.08 Mark Gibbons’s “My Life as a Capitalist”
Episode 4.07 John Donne’s “Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward”
Episode 4.06 Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”
Episode 4.05 Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”
Episode 4.04 The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem “The Battle of Brunanburh”
Episode 4.03 John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
Episode 4.02 Czeslaw Milosz’s “And Yet The Books”
Episode 4.01 John Ashbery’s “Just Walking Around”
Episode 3.11: Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Preacher Ruminates Behind the Sermon"
Episode 310: Alexander Pope's "Ode on Solitude"
Episode 309: Karl Shapiro's "Interlude III"
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