Village Life
All four poems are implied to take place in the titular village Spoon River and village life is prominent in most of the poems.
On one side there is the familiarity and comfort of a close community, where people are known by nicknames, everyone knows everyone and people are born and, if they ever leave, return to be buried. This is especially visible in the poem “The Hill”, which describes the village's cemetery.
On the other hand there is the inability to be different, or to stick out, as is highly visible in “Minerva Jones” where a woman is killed for not being as feminine or beautiful as other women. There is also a close-mindedness in regards to morals and how to live one's life, as featured in the tragic love affair in “Sarah Brown”.
Unhappy Love
The theme of one-sided or at the very least unhappy love is prominent in all poems, to varying degrees. In “The Hill” it is only hinted at as a cause of death of one of the people buried. In “Minerva Jones”, the poem's narrator, though yearning for it, receives no love at all, neither on a personal level, nor from the village. In “Sarah Brown” and “Herbert Marshall”, unhappy (or unfulfilling) relationships are the focus and both narrators have turned to adultery for comfort, to their spouses' suffering. An unhappy relationship is also the focus in “Mrs. Charles Bliss”. In this poem however, the narrator has been pressured to stay in the relationship, to the benefit of no one in the end, not even her children.
Death
Apart from the last poem of the anthology (“Mrs. Charles Bliss”), most of the poems' characters are dead. The narrators of “Minerva Jones”, “Sarah Brown” and “Herbert Marshall” are either explicitly stated or implied to be dead and the manner of their deaths are discussed.
The first poem, “The Hill”, is centered around the topic of death, describing in loving details the lives and deaths of those buried in the village's cemetery. The last poem “Mrs. Charles Bliss” deals with a different kind of death. Instead of a literal death, a mental or emotional death is visible in staying in their unhappy marriage.
