Edgar Lee Masters published Spoon River Anthology in 1915, a collection of free-verse epitaphs spoken by the dead of a fictional Illinois town. Masters grew up in small-town Illinois and knew the weight of local memory; in "Rutherford McDowell" he gives that memory to a photographer. The speaker’s work—enlarging old ambrotypes of pioneers and taking new portraits—places him exactly between generations, able to see what has been lost.
The poem opens with a practical task: "They brought me ambrotypes / Of the old pioneers to enlarge." An ambrotype is an early glass photograph, rare and fragile, so the request carries a note of preservation. The speaker also recalls sitting with someone "who was in being / When giant hands from the womb of the world / Tore the republic." Here the founding of the republic becomes mythic and bodily, not political: giant hands tear a nation from the earth’s womb. That language gives the pioneers a violent, almost superhuman origin. It also sets up the central question: "What was it in their eyes?—" The speaker cannot fully explain "that mystical pathos of drooped eyelids, / And the serene sorrow of their eyes." The pairing of "serene" and "sorrow" is the poem’s emotional center, suggesting endurance without complaint.
The eyes of the pioneers become "a pool of water, / Amid oak trees at the edge of a forest, / Where the leaves fall." This simile is not merely decorative. It builds a landscape of time passing: leaves drop, a cock crows from a far-off farmhouse, and the farmhouse belongs to "the third generation." The strong men and strong women who cleared the land are "gone and forgotten." The physical distance in the image—the farmhouse seen near the hills—mirrors the historical distance between the heroic past and the diminished present.
Masters writes in free verse, without rhyme, letting the lines stretch and pause like speech. The poem’s music comes from repetition and accumulation rather than meter. The final litany is especially powerful: "the old strength gone, / And the old faith gone, / And the old mastery of life gone, / And the old courage gone." Each repetition of "gone" lands like a bell toll. The photographer’s camera, supposedly an instrument of fact, becomes an instrument of elegy when it records the grandchildren and great-grandchildren: "Truly did my camera record their faces, too, / With so much of the old strength gone." The word "truly" is bitter; the camera confirms decline.
The closing clause complicates that decline by giving the lost "old courage" a living grammar. The courage that vanished once "labors and loves and suffers and sings / Under the sun!" Work, affection, pain, and song cover the full range of ordinary life, and "Under the sun" echoes Ecclesiastes, with its ancient sense of human effort and mortality. The poem mourns not just heroism but a whole way of being alive under open sky.
"Rutherford McDowell" is significant because it uses a small-town trade to examine a national myth. Through the photographer’s double vision—old ambrotypes and new portraits—Masters suggests that the republic’s later generations have inherited the land without inheriting the spirit that won it. The poem is quiet, elegiac, and devastating precisely because its speaker reports rather than declaims. In his camera and his unanswered question about those eyes, the past becomes both vivid and irrecoverable.