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?
Searcy Foote’s poem symbolizes the strides that a young, rebellious person can take in the 1920s in order to achieve their dreams. Searcy, who wants many riches out of life, channels all of his anger from his living condition into his actions, and shows no feelings of remorse towards his aunt, and takes off with her money.