Searcy Foote by Edgar Lee Masters — Read

I wanted to go away to college / But rich Aunt Persis wouldn't help me.

So I made gardens and raked the lawns / And bought John Alden's books with my earnings / And toiled for the very means of life.

I wanted to marry Delia Prickett, / But how could I do it with what I earned?

And there was Aunt Persis more than seventy, / Who sat in a wheel-chair half alive, / With her throat so paralyzed, when she swallowed / The soup ran out of her mouth like a duck --

A gourmand yet, investing her income / In mortgages, fretting all the time / About her notes and rents and papers.

That day I was sawing wood for her, / And reading Proudhon in between.

I went in the house for a drink of water, / And there she sat asleep in her chair, / And Proudhon lying on the table, / And a bottle of chloroform on the book, / She used sometimes for an aching tooth!

I poured the chloroform on a handkerchief / And held it to her nose till she died.

--

Oh Delia, Delia, you and Proudhon / Steadied my hand, and the coroner / Said she died of heart failure.

I married Delia and got the money --

A joke on you, Spoon River?