Free Verse. Free verse is poetry that avoids use of regular rhyme, meter, or division into stanzas. Free verse tends to sound more like ordinary speech than traditional verse does. As you read, look for elements in this poem that show that it is intended to sound like speech.
Tone. Tone is the emotional attitude toward the reader or toward the subject implied by a literary work. As you read, try to identify the speaker’s tone in this poem.
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“Lucinda Matlock” is from Spoon River Anthology, a collection of epitaphs (verse written to be inscribed on a tomb or to be read in commemoration of someone who has died). The speaker in these poems addresses the reader from beyond the grave, telling about the lives they lived. First serialized in the St. Louis Mirror in 1914–1915 under Masters’s pseudonym, Webster Ford, the epitaphs in Spoon River Anthology tell stories reminiscent of the life stories of people whom Masters knew in Petersburg and Lewiston, Illinois, near the Spoon River. Many of the names that Masters used in his anthology can be found on tombstones in the Lewiston cemetery.
Think about an elderly person you know. What attitude toward life does he or she express?
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