Searcy Foote

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?