This poem by the American poet Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950) is a good modern example of the ‘Ubi sunt’ or ‘Where are they now’ genre, of which prime examples might be François Villon’s ‘Ballade des dames du temps jadis’, or the famous passage from the Old English poem ‘The Wanderer’ that begins ‘Hwaer cwom mearg? Hwaer cwom mago?’ and that J.R.R.Tolkien so skilfully imitates in the ‘King of the Golden Hall’ chapter in ‘The Two Towers’: ‘Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?’. (Incidentally the Old English word ‘mearg’ or ‘mearh’, horse, is what gave Tolkien his word ‘meara’ for the line of horses to which Shadowfax belonged).

Here the lament is for a vanished America: the collection in which the poem first appeared, ‘The Spoon River Anthology’, was published in 1915, at a time when the memory of the Civil War and the Old West would still have been a living one in the minds of the old – it is easy to forget that Buffalo Bill, for example, did not die until 1915 and Wyatt Earp made it to 1929.

‘the hill’ – a hillside on the edge of town was a favourite site for a cemetery; cf. the popular appellation Boot Hill where the ‘Boot’ implies that the occupants died a violent death, with their boots on, rather than from natural causes.

‘Clary’s Grove’ – a pioneer settlement near New Salem, Illinois, associated in the 1830s with a gang of roysterers known as the Clary Grove Boys, with whose leader Jack Armstrong a young Abraham Lincoln, who was working at the time in a New Salem store, had a famous wrestling match.

‘Of what Abe Lincoln said/One time at Springfield’. I think this must refer to a famous speech, known as the Lyceum Address, that Abraham Lincoln made at Springfield, Illinois on January 27, 1838, in which he extols the virtues of the American constitution and prophetically enough states that threats to it are likely to come not from external enemies but from its own leaders showing a disregard for the rule of law.

The Hill

Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.

One passed in a fever,
One was burned in a mine,
One was killed in a brawl,
One died in jail,
One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife –
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?-
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.

One died in shameful child-birth,
One of a thwarted love,
One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
One of a broken pride, in the search for heart’s desire,
One after life in far-away London and Paris
Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag –
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
And Major Walker who had talked
With venerable men of the revolution?-
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.

They brought them dead sons from the war,
And daughters whom life had crushed,
And their children fatherless, crying –
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

Where is old Fiddler Jones
Who played with life all his ninety years,
Braving the sleet with bared breast,
Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,
Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?
Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,
Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary’s Grove,
Of what Abe Lincoln said
One time at Springfield.

Edgar Lee Masters