Read "One Woman's History" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
"The maiden free, the maiden wed. / Can never, never be the same, / A new life springs from out the dead / And with the speaking of a name -- / A breath upon the marriage bed, / She finds herself a something new.
"Where lay the shallows of the maid / No plummet line the wife can sound; / Where round the sunny islands played / The pulses of the great profound / Lies low the treacherous everglade.
"A wife is like an unknown sea, / Least known to him who thinks he knows / Where all the shores of Promise be, / And where the islands of Repose -- / And where the rocks that he must flee. "