Spoon River Anthology

The Hill, an exerpt from the Spoon River Anthology is a very well written poem that describes the life of five men (Masters).  They all have one characteristic associated with them and each one is different from the other.  Some of the men that are described in this poem do not have great characteristics.  The five characteristics, each referring to a different person are:  weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, and the fighter (Masters).  Maybe there are two good characteristics in here.  There is definitely one, but the fighter could go either way depending on how you put it in real life.  The other three are not characteristics that I wish to attain one day.  Each dies how you would imagine, the figher dies by fighting, and the rest you can put two and two together to figure out what caused them to die.  No matter the life, no matter the death, Masters is trying to get one point across and that is that you will be buried by a total stranger just like these five men were buried in the same hill.  No matter the life, it leads to one ending.  Masters is also trying to say that each of these death goes back to the person.  It is pretty easy to assume that and recognize, but Masters is trying to tell us to watch out for our roblems.  If we are a boozer, as the man in the story was than the chances of us dying of some alcohol related incident is likely.

Thoreau goes along with the ideal that we as a society need to fix our problems (Grant).  In this he states that the society has been so obsessed with trying to get everything that we do not need but the things that make us feel good.  In order to solve this, Thoreau states that the only way to overcome this is to start by going through ones self (Grant).  This relates with Masters ideas because we all have our problems and the only way to overcome them is to take it upon yourself.

Grant, P. B. "Nature in

Walden." McClinton-Temple, Jennifer ed. Encyclopedia of Themes in

Literature

. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2011. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.

http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=&iPin=ETL1134&SingleRecord=True (accessed January

30, 2012).

"Excerpt from." EReader.com:. A Barnes & Noble. Web. 02 Mar. 2012. <http://www.ereader.com/servlet/mw?t=book_excerpt>.