oon River. Cooney Potter is my favorite character. He tells how he acquired a small piece of land from his father, and through hard work, he became quite prominent, but never satisfied. Wishing to own two thousand acres, I bustled through the years with axe and plow, Toiling, denying myself, my wife, my sons, my daughters He says that his hard work killed him before he reached the age of sixty. He had achieved the American dream in the physical sensebut he had never taken the time to enjoy it.The prologue and epilogue are different, in the way that they are omniscient and haunting. The prologue sets the tone for the rest of the book. The poem is called The Hill, and is more structured than any of the character poems. It introduces some of the characters and their plights, only to bring us down at the end of each stanza, reminding us that All, all, are sleeping on the hill.The Epilogue is a very deep and symbolic poem that tells of the devil and God. The history of mankind is unfolded and told as a simple game of checkers between Beelzebub and God. The devil first beats God, then scatters the checkers across the floor. Then, with his assistants, Beelzebub creates humans, and breathes life into them, then raises the dead just to taunt them. The demons vanish, and Voices take their place, speaking of springtime, and God and of the universe. The whole epilogue seems to be a very cynical and dark look at God and religion. First of all, God loses the game of checkers to the devil- the checkerboard symbolizing earth, and the checkers peoples souls. Then the devil, not God, creates man and gives him life, and wakes the dead by impersonating Gabriel.The Spooniad is an incomplete poem written by Jonathan Swift Somers, included at the end of the book. The poem is about all the dead people from the town of Spoon River, done from the third-person perspective. Mr. Somers wanted to make an epic about the dead of a small American Town th...
