Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, published in 1915, is a collection of free-verse epitaphs in which the dead of a small Illinois town speak from the cemetery, exposing hidden griefs, hypocrisies, and dreams. Many of those voices are bitter or confiding. “Dillard Sissman” is different. It does not argue or confess. Instead, it lingers on a single remembered scene, and in doing so turns that scene into something close to a vision.
The speaker, lying in a pasture, watches buzzards circle overhead, feels the wind beating the grass into long waves, and keeps a kite aloft above the wind. The poem is not about a plot but about attention: the slow, almost hypnotic way a mind can become absorbed in moving air and light. The central idea could be stated as a threshold. The ordinary world—a hillside, a distant white farmhouse peeping from green trees—is poised on the edge of a transformation. When the speaker says “And I watch my kite,” the line sounds like a promise. Something is about to happen.
Masters builds the poem without rhyme, letting the line lengths rise and fall like the kite itself. The opening is filled with w and s sounds—“wheel,” “wide,” “sky,” “wind,” “grass”—so that the language seems to move in slow circles, matching the buzzards that “wheel and wheel.” The kite wobbles “like a man shaking his shoulders,” and the tail streams out and sinks. These are precise, physical images, yet they also suggest a body breathing or shrugging. The hills sleep; the farmhouse “peeps” from green trees. By giving the landscape small human verbs, Masters makes the whole scene feel quietly alive, as if the speaker is not alone.
The turn comes with the moon. The speaker says the thin moon will “kindle herself” and then “swing like a pendulum dial / To the tail of my kite.” Here the cosmic and the childlike are brought together: the moon becomes both a flame and a clock, tethered to a toy. The word “kindle” anticipates fire, but nothing yet burns. Then the poem breaks open with “A spurt of flame like a water-dragon / Dazzles my eyes—”. The simile is deliberately strange, mixing fire and water, serpent and light. It may be lightning, or it may be an ecstatic moment of inner vision. The dash cuts off the slow, circular movement. In the final line, “I am shaken as a banner!”, the speaker no longer watches the wind; he has become something the wind shakes. The self is turned into a flag, a ripple of cloth, a thing of pure movement.
Because the voice belongs to a dead speaker in a graveyard sequence, the spurt of flame can be read as the instant of death, perhaps a lightning strike while flying a kite. But Masters refuses to explain it. That refusal is part of the poem’s significance. In a collection famous for exposing secret motives, “Dillard Sissman” shows that a life can also be remembered as a flash of unparaphraseable beauty. The poem matters because it uses free verse not to argue or moralize, but to hold an instant open—buzzards, kite, moon, flame—until the boundary between a boy in a pasture and the dazzling sky disappears.