Edgar Lee Masters wrote “Roy Butler” as one of the epitaphs in *Spoon River Anthology*, the 1915 collection that let the dead of a fictional Illinois town speak plainly about the lives they hid. Masters, who grew up in rural Illinois and later practiced law in Chicago, knew both the intimacy of small-town feuds and the cold machinery of courtrooms. Roy Butler’s voice rises from the grave to protest a charge of rape that was accepted by a local jury but, according to his final line, rejected by the higher court and by his own wife.
The poem begins with an almost bitter compliment: if the “learned Supreme Court of Illinois” could uncover the secret of every case as well as it does “a case of rape,” it would be the greatest court in the world. The conditional hangs over everything that follows. Roy then describes his jury as “neighbors mostly,” with “Butch” Weldy as foreman, a jury that needed only “ten minutes / And two ballots” to find him guilty. The speed and the familiar nickname make the trial feel less like a search for truth than a village reflex.
What supposedly led to the accusation is almost absurdly small: a quarrel over a fence and an argument over whether Ipava or Table Grove was the finer town. Those place names root the poem in rural Illinois, while the fence becomes a quiet symbol of the boundaries and resentments between neighbors. Roy presents himself as a man who woke one morning with “the love of God / Brimming over” his heart and went to settle the fence “in the spirit of Jesus Christ.” The line break after “Brimming over” lets his religious impulse overflow into the next line, but the mood collapses as soon as he enters the Bandle house. Mrs. Bandle smiles and invites him in; then, in a single sharp dash, she slams the door and screams, “Take your hands off, you low down varlet!” The archaic insult “varlet” sounds almost theatrical, as if the scene were being performed for the husband who conveniently enters just then. Roy waves his hands, chokes up with words, and runs when Richard Bandle reaches for a gun.
The closing lines return to the opening frame: “But neither the Supreme Court nor my wife / Believed a word she said.” That is the poem’s cruel irony. The two people or institutions best positioned to know the truth—his wife and the state’s highest court—do not believe the accusation, yet the neighbor jury still rushed to guilt. Masters does not give us Mrs. Bandle’s interior or proof of Roy’s innocence; we hear only his version. That limitation is part of the design. In a town already divided by fences and civic pride, a serious accusation becomes another weapon, and the local verdict arrives much faster than understanding.
The poem is written in free verse, with no regular rhyme or meter, and that plainness makes it sound like testimony or a conversation overheard in the cemetery. Words such as “secret,” “neighbors,” “slammed,” and “believed” carry the weight of hidden truth, intimate judgment, sudden violence, and fragile credibility. The enjambment from “the love of God / Brimming over” spills across the line just as Roy’s emotion spills into action, and the dash after “I entered—” marks the exact moment a peaceful visit becomes an accusation. “Roy Butler” is significant because it strips the lofty language from legal and religious ideals and shows how ordinary prejudice, petty local history, and a single shouted lie can overpower both. Its questions about who is believed and how quickly a community judges remain disturbingly alive more than a century after Masters wrote them.