Explore "Mrs. Merritt" by Edgar Lee Masters on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Silent before the jury, / Returning no word to the judge when he asked me / If I had aught to say against the sentence, / Only shaking my head.
What could I say to people who thought / That a woman of thirty-five was at fault / When her lover of nineteen killed her husband?
Even though she had said to him over and over, / "Go away, Elmer, go far away, / I have maddened your brain with the gift of my body:
You will do some terrible thing."
And just as I feared, he killed my husband;
With which I had nothing to do, before God!
Silent for thirty years in prison!
And the iron gates of Joliet / Swung as the gray and silent trusties / Carried me out in a coffin.