20 pages • 40 minutes read
Edgar Lee MastersGeorge Gray
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1916A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Dynamics of Regret
For the living, the concept of regret involves a difficult triangulation of past, present, and future. By recognizing the missteps of the past, the person illuminates with new perception the unfolding present and, in turn, commits to applying the lessons learned to engage a more productive and more rewarding future. Regrets are paid forward—learn from the past to reshape the future, to tap into promise that, without the difficult (and painful) realizations of regret, would be otherwise lost. In short, regret is productive, positive, and rewarding.
“George Gray,” indeed, most of the poems in Masters’ collection, applies the dynamics of regret to those upon whom its illuminations are lost: the dead. From the perspective of the afterlife, life’s bad choices, missteps, flawed judgments, and ill-considered actions are frozen moments, the regret now inevitably the stuff of bitterness and irony. In this, the poem counsels to the reader to look upon your life and learn its most difficult lessons now. For that reason, the saddest and most poignant word in the poem appears in Line 10: the sad, single word “now.” I know, George Gray concedes, now that I am dead, I know I should have lived when I was alive. Because the poem offers no specifics—particular relationships avoided, specific adventures declined, definable moments of regret—the poem touches everyone with the capacity to dream and the lack of nerve to follow that difficult path.
Imagine, the poem argues, chewing over those regrets for an eternity. “George Gray” is a kind of eulogy for the reader, or more specifically, the kind of eulogy the reader does not want read at the time of their death. In recasting himself as an object cautionary tale, George Gray reminds us of the value of regret during life while there is still time to act on its revelations, and the slow-motion horror of it after death when it is too late.
The Terror of Risk
When life demands choice, the riskier option always beckons, always taunts. Commit to this relationship or not; pursue education there or not; accept that career or turn it down. Life is only tidy and neat, wonderfully logical and reassuring, in retrospect. With the generosity of hindsight, those life-decisions to follow new paths, pursue uncertain opportunities, and take a shot at long-shot dreams all seem to find their way to reassuring patterns of inevitability, like the polished stones in a turning kaleidoscope find their way to gorgeous patterns. But at the time, risk was terrifying and, on the whole, better avoided than pursued; such is the logic that guided George Gray’s Prufrockian life.
The poem, however, reminds us that, at the time, risk itself is always a terrifying prospect. People live interred in the comfortable status quo, defining every day by the metrics of an established routine with guaranteed and predictable outcomes. It is not only reasonable but logical to see risk as a threat. It is a cliché. Why, the logic of common sense insists, why upset the apple cart? In valorizing conformity and the commitment to the status quo, such logic demonizes risk and sees those who pursue its siren call as foolhardy, immature, and irresponsible. When new experiences come beckoning, George Gray admits, he declined the invitation. Echoing Prufrock himself, George says, “I was afraid” (Line 7), and later, “I dreaded the chances” (Line 8).
In this, George Gray is reliably clear-sighted and judicious. His reward, however, is now his eternal punishment: a life of calm routine closing in a final devastating quiet, a life never upended by surprise, never challenged by the intensities of joy or sorrow, never propelled by restlessness or desire. To borrow the shattering implications of his tombstone engraving, his “boat,” outfitted for the seas, wisely or stupidly never left port, its sails untested, its fitness for adventure never explored.
The Price of a Quiet Life
It is tempting to bring biography into any thematic reading of “George Gray.” Remarkable about George Gray is that, of all the residents of the town of Spoon River, his poem does not reveal any specifics of his life, no context of biography, no indication of the particulars of his life—age, job, education, circumstances of his relationships, the particulars of his death. Nothing is revealed.
In this, it is tempting to see in “George Gray” a kind of anti-Edgar Lee Masters. Raised by a minimally-skilled lawyer-father who struggled to find any meaningful success from that commitment, and who struggled to find reward in his commitment to a family that became increasingly a burden, Masters himself dreamed of being a poet, a high-risk, long-shot chance that, for more than 20 years, he kept to the margins as he struggled to find rewards in his life as a public defender of the poor and the underrepresented, and also in his life as a husband and father. His law degree, his position in a succession of law firms, guaranteed that the dream of being a poet was radical, misplaced, and ultimately a bad, bad idea.
The choice between lawyer or poet: a practical component of a functioning society with the expectation of community approval and respect, or a social misfit, a rebel without a clue, a romantic malingerer, a dreamer dismissed by the community as a waste of energy and time. Masters’ own life can be reflected in the psychology of George Gray as he imagines, what if he had stayed a lawyer, stayed content to work the day-to-day grind in return for maintaining a sinecure in the community and providing a family with financial security: Imagine, I had never taken my boat out to sea. That Masters himself took more than 20 years to finally follow the uncertain urgencies of his heart and cast off from the shore is reflected in the depth of George Gray’s decision to never do that, to wait until death to realize that life demands participation and necessarily disparages comfort.
To accept the world of work and home as horizon enough, the poem argues, is to accept less and ultimately to make the most of a diminished thing. Thus, Gray urgently advises the reader to “catch the winds of destiny” (Line 11) and to take them wherever they may lead.
