| 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. | 5 |
| 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 | 10 |
| 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, | 15 |
| 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, | 20 |
| 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 | 25 |
| Said she died of heart failure. | |
| I married Delia and got the money— | |
| A joke on you, Spoon River? | |
