The Town Marshal's qualification for the job is that he has killed a man. Everything else in Edgar Lee Masters's poem follows from that. The Prohibitionists, having voted the saloons out of town, want someone to enforce their will, and they choose the man whose record is worst. He had killed "a Swede / At the saw-mill near Maple Grove" back when he was "a drinking man," and now that he has "joined the church," that violence counts as a credential. Their ideal marshal is "Grim, righteous, strong, courageous," and above all "a hater of saloons and drinkers." The respectable townspeople have not reformed violence. They have hired it.
The speaker is dead, and he tells his story calmly. The poem appears in Masters's *Spoon River Anthology*, a book of monologues by the dead of a small town, and that setting explains the voice, which has nothing left to defend and so reports events without excuses. He never says the killing of the Swede was wrong, and he doesn't say whether he paid for it. The Swede has no name, only a nationality, while the man who later kills the marshal gets a full name, Jack McGuire. The poem seems to suggest that one death was cheap and the other very expensive.
The form suits this dry tone. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only the loose rhythm of someone telling a story in plain speech. Many sentences begin with "And," which gives the account a flat, accumulating feel, as if the marshal were laying out evidence. The long list of adjectives in lines seven and eight is almost bureaucratic, like a job advertisement. Then the poem narrows to one grotesque detail: the town "presented me with a loaded cane." The ceremonial verb "presented" makes it sound like a gift for long service, yet the cane is a weapon disguised as a gentleman's accessory, and the poem has just shown that the town's morality is disguised in the same way. The marshal uses it at once: "With which I struck Jack McGuire / Before he drew the gun with which he killed me." The repeated "with which" links the two weapons, and the sentence moves so fast that the marshal's own aggression becomes clear before the reader has time to notice it. McGuire fires only after being struck.
The last third of the poem turns to justice, and the dead speaker has the most to say about it. The Prohibitionists "spent their money in vain / To hang him." The word "money" suggests a prosecution bought rather than earned, vengeance by the same people who hired the marshal. They fail because of a supernatural intervention: "in a dream / I appeared to one of the twelve jurymen / And told him the whole secret story." The phrase "secret story" implies that the public version, the righteous marshal murdered by a drunk, was false, and that the truth about who struck first could surface only through a ghost. Because the dream reaches just one of the twelve, the dead man seems to have swayed the jury at the margin, enough to save McGuire from the rope.
The final line is the best in the poem: "Fourteen years were enough for killing me." It is both a verdict and a shrug. The marshal no longer sides with the town that hired him. He has become a fairer judge of his own death than the living were, and he prices his life at fourteen years without bitterness or self-pity. The line also gives the poem a grim symmetry. A man once killed with no apparent consequence, and a man who killed him pays for it, so the poem's accounting is rough and unequal.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it exposes in so few lines. It shows a community that wants clean streets and is willing to use a killer to get them. It shows how moral crusades can reward violence if it is aimed at the right targets. And it suggests that the truth about a death is rarely the version the town prefers, and sometimes comes only from the grave.