Edgar Lee Masters published Spoon River Anthology in 1915, a collection of free-verse epitaphs spoken by the dead of a fictional Illinois town. These voices strip away small-town politeness to confess resentments, failures, and secrets. “Fletcher McGee” belongs to that graveyard chorus: a man still brooding over a woman who, he insists, drained him. But the poem quickly complicates the accusation. It becomes a study of how two people can possess and deform each other, and how the face we give another person can turn into our own ghost.
The opening lines sound like a courtroom of one: “She took my strength by minutes, / She took my life by hours.” The repeated verb makes her a thief of time, and the escalating units—from minutes to hours, then days and minutes again—create a sense of slow, unstoppable consumption. She is likened to a “fevered moon / That saps the spinning world,” an image that turns personal exhaustion into something cosmic and predatory. Yet the poem does not stay on this one-sided charge. The pivot arrives in the tenth line: “She was a hunk of sculptor’s clay, / My secret thoughts were fingers.” Suddenly agency shifts. The speaker is no longer merely drained; he is shaping her. His hidden thoughts move behind her “pensive brow” and “lined it deep with pain,” set her lips, sagged her cheeks, drooped her eye. The face he describes sounds carved by grief, and he is the carver.
Masters builds the poem from short, mostly end-stopped lines that feel like a man thinking in fragments from the grave. There is no regular rhyme, but the language returns to key words—took, minutes, clay, soul, struggles, face—so that the poem tightens around the relationship like a fist. The similes do much of the atmospheric work: days pass “like shadows,” while minutes “wheeled like stars,” making time both insubstantial and mechanically vast. The sculpting metaphor extends until it becomes something close to possession. His soul enters the clay and “Fighting like seven devils,” struggles inside her. The phrase “It was not mine, it was not hers” captures the central confusion: neither person fully owns this soul, this face, this life they have made together.
That ambiguity is what makes “Fletcher McGee” more than a bitter epitaph. The speaker describes violence against himself—“I beat the windows, shook the bolts. / I hid me in a corner”—but the trap is as much internal as physical. He fears the face he has helped create, and she hates it. By the ending, the roles reverse again: “And then she died and haunted me, / And hunted me for life.” The near-rhyme of “haunted” and “hunted” closes the poem with pursuit. Even after death, the relationship keeps moving, keeps chasing. Because this is an epitaph, the speaker may already be dead, which makes the haunting permanent.
The poem’s significance lies in its refusal of easy sympathy. Masters could have written a simple complaint about a draining lover. Instead, he makes the speaker an accomplice in his own misery, a man whose secret thoughts become fingers, whose soul fights inside another person’s clay. “Fletcher McGee” captures a psychological truth: intimacy can turn two people into sculptor and stone, then blur the difference until neither can stand the face that emerges. That unflinching view of love as mutual deformation, spoken from the grave, is exactly what made Spoon River Anthology feel so modern and so quietly shocking.