Theodore the Poet

As a boy, Theodore, you sat for long hours
On the shore of the turbid Spoon
With deep-set eye staring at the door of the crawfish’s burrow,
Waiting for him to appear, pushing ahead,
First his waving antennae, like straws of hay,
And soon his body, colored like soap-stone,
Gemmed with eyes of jet.
And you wondered in a trance of thought
What he knew, what he desired, and why he lived at all.
But later your vision watched for men and women
Hiding in burrows of fate amid great cities,
Looking for the souls of them to come out,
So that you could see
How they lived, and for what,
And why they kept crawling so busily
Along the sandy way where water fails
As the summer wanes.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 19, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Theodore the Poet” appears in the Spoon River Anthology, first serialized in Reedy’s Mirror but later published as a book by The Macmillan Company in 1915. As James Hurt, former professor of English at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, writes in “The Sources of the Spoon: Edgar Lee Masters and the ‘Spoon River Anthology,’” published in The Centennial Review, vol. 24, no. 4 (Fall 1980), novelist Theodore Dreiser served as the inspiration for the poem, which Masters drafted prior to the other 213 character studies that comprise the Anthology. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, vol. 3 (Oxford University, 2004), Matthew J. Caballero, associate dean of the school of education at Hunter College, writes that the poem “talks about a young poet’s fascination with nature and how that later develops into an interest in people’s souls. Mirroring the author’s own poetic dreams, this epigraph charges the poet to tell the heroic story of enduring a difficult, waning life.”