Explore "Theodore the Poet" by Edgar Lee Masters on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
As a boy, Theodore, you sat for long hours / On the shore of the turbid Spoon / With deep-set eye staring at the door of the crawfish's burrow, / Waiting for him to appear, pushing ahead, / First his waving antennae, like straws of hay, / And soon his body, colored like soap-stone, / Gemmed with eyes of jet.
And you wondered in a trance of thought / What he knew, what he desired, and why he lived at all.
But later your vision watched for men and women / Hiding in burrows of fate amid great cities, / Looking for the souls of them to come out, / So that you could see / How they lived, and for what, / And why they kept crawling so busily / Along the sandy way where water fails / As the summer wanes.