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? | |