Explanation of Petit the Poet from Spoon River Antholoogy?

Question

Here is the poem by Edgar Lee Masters, and I need an explanation. I actually have to act this out.

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel--
Faint iambics the the full breeze wakens--
But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Ballades by the score with the same old thought:
The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanised;
And what is love but a rose that fades?
Life all around me here in the village:
Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth,
Courage, constancy, heroism, failure--
All in the loom, and oh what patterns!
Woodlands, meadows, streams, and rivers-
Blind to all of it all my life long.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,
While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?

Answer 1

It's the beginning arising of his poetry - the seeds in the dry pod part.

He lives in the great poets and visions they evoke, but his own poetry is just starting to arise from the seeds.

Answer 2

To me, this clearly is a darker view of a man who devoted his entire being to writing poetry that was, in fact, weak, bland, and lacking in freshness and originality. Petit-- a name that conjures up the commonplace and the small- failed to capture the true magnificence expressed so eloquently by the great classical poets-- poets like Milton and Keats-- whose voices still resonate with the full symphonic potency of the heavens themselves. So... here lies Petit-- the body of a man who wanted to offer his talents to the world for all of time, when, in fact, he will likely not be remembered at all-- except perhaps as a writer of feeble, hackneyed verse. There is, however, another perspective to be considered! Those little seeds with their meaningless little "tick-tick" sounds spoke to Petit of the amazing beauty and wonder yet to be born-- that same elusive grace that the earth provides so profoundly and at the same time so fleetingly in the first crocuses of spring. If Petit appreciated the amazing wonder of the everyday and he devoted his life to giving it all words, how could anyone consider his life as something of a failure or a joke? And, c mon-- let s face it: who is going to go around humming Ezra Pound?-- As for myself, I prefer to picture all those little rhyming "i-olets" blossoming from his dust and the fairies eternally dancing around his grave.

Answer 3

you love nature, and you love poetry, but you feel like maybe you missed out on so much of life by writing all time.
And maybe you feel like you wrote the same old stuff your whole life, because you missed out on really living it.