Che cosa vedi adesso? [...] Luce, solo luce, che trasforma tutto il mondo in giocattolo. Molto bene, faremo gli occhiali così. - Edgar Lee Masters

I bought every kind of machine that's known-
Grinders, shellers, planters, mowers,
Mills and rakes and ploughs and threshers-
And all of them stood in the rain and sun,
Getting rusted, warped and battered,
For I had no sheds to store them in,
And no use for most of them.
And toward the last, when I thought it over,
There by my window, growing clearer
About myself, as my pulse slowed down,
And looked at one of the mills I bought-
Which I didn't have the slightest need of,
As things turned out, and I never ran-
A fine machine, once brightly varnished,
And eager to do its work,
Now with its paint washed off-
I saw myself as a good machine
That Life had never used.

My name used to be in the papers daily
As having dined somewhere,
Or traveled somewhere,
Or rented a house in Paris,
Where I entertained the nobility.
I was forever eating or traveling,
Or taking the cure at Baden-Baden.
Now I am here to do honor
To Spoon River, here beside the family whence I sprang.
No one cares now where I dined,
Or lived, or whom I entertained,
Or how often I took the cure at Baden-Baden!

And I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle — And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.