O beautiful young republic for whom my John and I
Gave all of our strength and love!

The two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of America is nearly upon us. Great things have been done by great people, but I always find myself more interested in those who never made the news, nor the history books. Edgar Lee Master’s must have felt the same way, to judge by his book of poems Spoon River Anthology.

The people that spoke from that town’s cemetery, through Master’s pen, a century ago, have a lot to say to the rest of us. I am particularly moved by Rebecca Wasson, a hundred years old, remembering in her quiet room, and waiting for her husband’s return, which can only come at her very end.

Rebecca Wasson

Spring and Summer, Fall and Winter and Spring,
After each other drifting, past my window drifting
And I lay so many years watching them drift and counting
The years till a terror came in my heart at times,
With the feeling that I had become eternal; at last
My hundredth year was reached! And still I lay
Hearing the tick of the clock, and the low of cattle
And the scream of a jay flying through falling leaves!
Day after day alone in a room of the house
Of a daughter-in-law stricken with age and gray.
And by night, or looking out of the window by day
My thought ran back, it seemed, through infinite time
To North Carolina and all my girlhood days,
And John, my John, away to the war with the British,
And all the children, the deaths, and all the sorrows.
And that stretch of years like a prairie in Illinois
Through which great figures passed like hurrying horsemen,
Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Webster, Clay.
O beautiful young republic for whom my John and I
Gave all of our strength and love!
And O my John!
Why, when I lay so helpless in bed for years,
Praying for you to come, was your coming delayed?
Seeing that with a cry of rapture, like that I uttered
When you found me in old Virginia after the war,
I cried when I beheld you there by the bed,
As the sun stood low in the west growing smaller and fainter
In the light of your face!