Most people go through life, trying to make the best out of it. But what if one had advice from those who had already gone through it? That is what Edgar Lee Masters is telling readers in his Spoon River Anthology. From the introductory poem of "The Hill" down to every last epitaph, using brilliant form and elements, Masters is able to convey his point and add that ghostly wisdom to the living. Edgar Lee Masters wrote "The Hill" as an introduction to the rest of his works in Spoon River Anthology; "the Hill" sets up the rest of the poems with its mood and story. .
In "The Hill" Masters is presenting small parts of some of the other poems in the anthology to draw the reader into the story. He mentions by name several of the characters from the other poems and gives the reader an idea of what those people were like. The first four stanzas follow a similar pattern. Masters introduces five characters in the first line of the first and third stanzas and in the second line describes the role each of them played in the town. The second and fourth stanzas are devoted to telling how each of them met their demise. Masters uses a sort of parallel structure in the way he compares them, never restating the names, just keeping the details in the same order as the names are. The fifth stanza then introduces five more characters but uses four lines instead of one to get through the names. Then in the sixth stanza, instead of describing how each or them had died, groups the five together to make one statement about all their lives. The seventh and final stanza is devoted to the life of Fiddler Jones. This stanza does not follow any of the patterns set forth by the earlier ones. The longest stanza in the poem, it even breaks the pattern of the last lines of the stanzas. In stanzas one through six, the last line alternates between "All, all are sleeping on the hill" and "all, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill" (Masters).
