Blog #12

Edgar Lee Masters is the author of Spoon River Anthology, which is basically just a series of poems about different people. One of the first poems I came across is titled The Hill and is about all of the different people who have died and are buried on the hill. This poem is different from the rest of the poems I have seen in Spoon River Anthology because unlike most of the other poems that are about one single person it is about a group of people. This poem talks about different people and the different ways they have died and how they all ended up buried together on the hill. The book Spoon River Anthology all together is about a small town, so its kind of cool that you can read about one person is one poem, and then see them mentioned somewhere in another poem. I think that because I did not read the whole book I did not get the full affect of the story, but I think if I did it would be pretty cool. I think The Hill is a pretty depressing poem considering it is about people who have died and the ways they have died. For example, it says "One passed in a fever, one burned in a mine, one was killed in a brawl, one died in jail, one fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife-" (). One of the most creepy and repetitive lines in this poem reads "All, all, are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping, on the hill"(). I think that this line is so creepy because it is referring to the dead people on the hill by saying they are sleeping. Another reason I think it is creepy is that it is very repetitive in just that line and also throughout the whole poem.

This poem seems to be very eerie and almost a little careless about the dead people sleeping on the hill, which I think is like complete opposites with the way Ralph Waldo Emerson feels about death. When Emerson's wife dies he is devastated and miserable, and by the way this poem is written it seems to have a lot more eeriness than devastation.