Edgar Lee Masters grew up in small-town Illinois, and in 1915 he published *Spoon River Anthology*, a landmark collection of free-verse epitaphs spoken by the dead of a fictional town. The book scandalized and fascinated readers because its speakers confess envy, hypocrisy, and private wounds that small-town politeness usually buried. Masters himself had known both the pull of rural life and the ambitions of a Chicago law practice, and his epitaphs often turn on the gap between public reputation and private failure. “Albert Schirding” is one of those confessions. It opens as a correction to another resident, Jonas Keene, who “thought his lot a hard one / Because his children were all failures.” Albert’s response sets up the poem’s central idea: there is a harder fate, “to be a failure while your children are successes.”
Albert describes that fate through a stark family metaphor. He “raised a brood of eagles” who “flew away at last,” leaving him “a crow on the abandoned bough.” The contrast between eagles and crow does not simply mark talent; it marks abandonment. The children soar, while the parent is left behind on a dead branch. His response is not to enjoy their success but to compete with it. With the ambition “to prefix / Honorable to my name,” he runs for County Superintendent of Schools, spending his “accumulations” to win—and loses. The word *accumulations* makes the loss feel total, as if he spent everything he had gathered over a lifetime on one attempt to impress his children.
Then the poem pivots to the daughter’s triumph. That fall she receives first prize in Paris for her picture “The Old Mill.” The parenthetical detail is quietly devastating: the painting shows “the water mill before Henry Wilkin put in steam.” The daughter is honored for capturing an older world, one not yet overtaken by industrial power. Albert, too, is an old-world figure, a local man who sought a modest title and failed, while his daughter wins a cosmopolitan prize. The irony is spatial and generational: a county election versus Paris, a father’s accumulation spent and a daughter’s first prize won.
Masters constructs the poem in plain free verse, without rhyme, so that the rhythms feel like speech and the line breaks carry emotional weight. The pause after “to prefix / Honorable to my name” makes the title hover just out of reach. The short phrase “—and lost” lands like a blow. Imagery is spare but sharp: eagles, crow, abandoned bough, old mill, steam. The word *finished* in the final line works with deliberate finality. After his daughter’s success, “The feeling that I was not worthy of her finished me.” It could mean he died of that feeling or that he simply stopped being able to live with himself; either way, the poem treats shame as a mortal force.
What makes “Albert Schirding” significant is its unsparing look at parental pride. A child’s success is supposed to fulfill a parent, but here it unravels him. The poem refuses the sentimental idea that love and ambition easily coexist. It also shows *Spoon River Anthology*’s larger method: ordinary voices, freed by death, speak the truths they could not say in life. Albert Schirding’s confession is brief, bitter, and memorable because it names a hidden wound—that being surpassed by one’s children can feel less like joy than like being left behind on a bare branch, watching eagles fly away.