“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” says Henry David Thoreau in his famous memoir, Walden. The world is surely very complex, and at some point, one must strive to escape the complexity of everyday life and truly experience life to the fullest. Just like Thoreau, there are many others who share this same idea. In “Lucinda Matlock,” “Emily Sparks,” and “Reuben Pantier,” Edgar Lee Masters emphasizes that through perseverance and will, one can discover the marrow of life, even in a world filled with such darkness. The poem “Lucinda Matlock” interestingly shares the same name with the speaker, who tells of her long, hardworking life while also encouraging the reader to live life, and not complain about it. Within the first half of the poem, the speaker …show more content…
Through these powerful words, the speaker emphasizes the necessity of living life fully to truly appreciate it. In this poem, Masters reveals to the reader that, yes, it can be quite hard to determine exactly what a “good” life may be, but it can certainly be done by living the best of it, just as Lucinda Matlock did. Lucinda Matlock did acknowledge that many were having some sort of struggles during life, and throughout the volume, there were many other people who had a say in raising one’s spirits. This is true, considering that “Images of a unity to counter the fragmentation of Spoon River life appear throughout the anthology, though they are concentrated in the last third. The most persuasive and important of these is announced by Emily Sparks [a significant name in itself] when she tells Reuben Pantier [her recipient] to work that his clay may yield to his fire” (Hurt online). The form of this poem, “Emily Sparks,” is written as if the speaker (who shares the same name with the poem) is writing a letter to someone whom she cares deeply for. She writes, “Did I know my boy right, / Thinking of him as a spirit awake, / Active, ever aspiring?” (ll. 6-7). The syllables