{
 "id": "edgar-lee-masters/abel-melveny",
 "title": "Abel Melveny",
 "ordinal": null,
 "subtitle": null,
 "poet": "Edgar Lee Masters",
 "poet_slug": "edgar-lee-masters",
 "language": "en",
 "book": "Spoon River Anthology",
 "book_slug": "spoon-river-anthology",
 "book_kind": "volume",
 "sequence": 156,
 "container": null,
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1916,
  "venue": "Spoon River Anthology (1916)",
  "note": "First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established.",
  "uncertain": false,
  "sources": [
   "https://archive.org/details/spoonriveranthol021mast"
  ]
 },
 "source": {
  "kind": "standard-ebooks",
  "repo": "standardebooks/edgar-lee-masters_spoon-river-anthology",
  "file": "spoon-river-anthology.xhtml",
  "upstream": [
   "https://web.archive.org/web/20080723131115/http://spoonriveranthology.net/spoon/river/originalOrder/",
   "https://archive.org/details/spoonriveranthol021mast"
  ],
  "rights": "public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931)"
 },
 "verification": {
  "level": "structural-only",
  "last_checked": "2026-08-20"
 },
 "stats": {
  "n_lines": 18,
  "n_stanzas": 1,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 45,
  "max_indent": 0
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 "site_ready": true,
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 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "I bought every kind of machine that’s known⁠—",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Grinders, shellers, planters, mowers,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Mills and rakes and ploughs and threshers⁠—",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And all of them stood in the rain and sun,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Getting rusted, warped and battered,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "For I had no sheds to store them in,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And no use for most of them.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And toward the last, when I thought it over,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "There by my window, growing clearer",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "About myself, as my pulse slowed down,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And looked at one of the mills I bought⁠—",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Which I didn’t have the slightest need of,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "As things turned out, and I never ran⁠—",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "A fine machine, once brightly varnished,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And eager to do its work,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Now with its paint washed off⁠—",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I saw myself as a good machine",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That Life had never used.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}