Thoughts of Spoon River

“They have chiseled on my stone…” Cassius Hueffer,   who “made warfare on life”, has finally been tamed by those who never managed to impose their idea of control over him while he lived. They have claimed him in death who, in life, went unswayed by their words, for he “could not cope with slanderous tongues”. Only now he is dead are they able to make him submit to their words, in the form of the epitaph “[g]raven by a fool!” Whatever kind of man Cassius Hueffer was, his importance to the community of Spoon River was such that they could not let him simply die and be rid of him. Even as they laid him in his grave, they did not give up on the need to reclaim him as one of their own. This man in whom the “elements were so mixed”, who could never succumb to a gentle life for fear that in so doing he would relinquish the freedom of the fight, had to be rebranded rather than merely discarded because a community in which he lived his life could never be the bastion of small t...