It Takes Life to Love Life

These are the closing words of a simple but beautiful poem by Edgar Lee Masters, published in 1915 as part of the Spoon River Anthology, which presented the thoughts of various occupants of the graveyard in a small American town. The speaker embraced life, with its hardships and sorrows, and never felt limited by the confines of her existence. Why was it so easy for someone so un-'liberated' to feel so free and fulfilled? After a century of 'liberation' from such a life, why are so many feeling the 'sorrow and weariness, / Anger, discontent and drooping hopes' to which she refers? Here's the poem in full:

Lucinda Matlock


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 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.