Edgar Lee Masters first published Spoon River Anthology in 1915, as Progressive Era readers were growing uneasy about small-town hypocrisy and public corruption. A Chicago lawyer who had grown up near the Spoon River, Masters turned the conventional graveyard elegy inside out; instead of praising the departed, his epitaphs expose buried grievances, envies, and half-realized lives. “Ida Chicken” is one such voice, a woman whose modest hopes collide with a very specific local injustice.
The poem follows Ida Chicken’s account of preparing for a long-deferred trip to Paris. After attending Chautauqua lectures and studying French for twenty years, committing the grammar “almost by heart,” she decides to “give my culture a final polish.” The vanity of that phrase is gentle, almost comic. She goes to Peoria for a passport, and on the way she notes that Thomas Rhodes was on the train that morning. At the district court, a clerk makes her swear to “support and defend / The constitution—yes, even me— / Who couldn’t defend or support it at all!” In the years before national women’s suffrage, that self-mocking aside carries extra weight: Ida sees herself as outside the serious business of citizenship, perhaps because her culture has been ornamental rather than political. Then comes the twist. In the very next room, a federal judge decides that the Constitution exempts Thomas Rhodes from paying taxes for the Spoon River water works. The central idea lives in that proximity. The Constitution is presented to Ida as a sacred oath, but one room away it becomes a legal loophole for a man of influence. Civic language claims to bind everyone equally, yet its practical machinery protects the powerful.
Masters builds the poem in free verse, so its music comes from speech rhythms rather than rhyme or meter. The lines are uneven, the sentences plain, as if Ida were talking over a fence. Parentheses work like whispers: “(Thomas Rhodes was on the train that morning.)” The detail might seem incidental, but it plants Rhodes in the story just before his privilege is revealed. Enjambment also does quiet work. The phrase “committing the grammar / Almost by heart” breaks on “Almost,” puncturing Ida’s achievement. Likewise, “Made me swear to support and defend / The constitution” places “the constitution” on its own line, giving it official weight only to undercut it later. The poem’s imagery swings between Paris and Peoria, between the polish of French grammar and the unglamorous public utility of the water works. The phrase “water works” is deliberately concrete. Paris promises refinement; the water works bring the poem back to taxes, infrastructure, and the unpoetic machinery of civic life.
The poem’s significance lies in its double exposure. It catches an individual’s modest cultural aspiration and, through the “very next room,” reveals a systemic unfairness. Ida Chicken is not a hero; she is an ordinary observer with a sharp eye for the gap between oath and outcome. The Constitution she swears to defend becomes, in the judge’s ruling, an instrument that lets Rhodes escape a public obligation. That irony still bites more than a century later, and Masters delivers it without preaching, simply by placing a passport oath and a federal ruling side by side.