"Lillian Stewart" by Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950)

     Lillian Stewart is the name of a character in The Lost Years (2012), a novel by Mary Higgins Clark that I am reading now. Here is a poem from Spoon River Anthology (1915) by Edgar Lee Masters (who was born on this day in 1869), a poem titled "Lillian Stewart."


LILLIAN STEWART

I was the daughter of Lambert Hutchins,
Born in a cottage near the grist-mill,
Reared in the mansion there on the hill,
With its spires, bay-windows, and roof of slate.
How proud my mother was of the mansion!
How proud of father's rise in the world!
And how my father loved and watched us,
And guarded our happiness.
But I believe the house was a curse,
For father's fortune was little beside it;
And when my husband found he had married
A girl who was really poor,
He taunted me with the spires,
And called the house a fraud on the world,
A treacherous lure to young men, raising hopes
Of a dowry not to be had;
And a man while selling his vote
Should get enough from the people's betrayal
To wall the whole of his family in.
He vexed my life till I went back home
And lived like an old maid till I died,
Keeping house for father.

Edgar Lee Masters

(Source of photo: The Poetry Foundation)