{
 "id": "edgar-lee-masters/indignation-jones",
 "title": "“Indignation” Jones",
 "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": 22,
 "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": 24,
  "n_stanzas": 1,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 58,
  "max_indent": 0
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "You would not believe, would you,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That I came from good Welsh stock?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That I was purer blooded than the white trash here?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And of more direct lineage than the New Englanders",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And Virginians of Spoon River?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "You would not believe that I had been to school",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And read some books.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "You saw me only as a run-down man,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "With matted hair and beard",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And ragged clothes.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Sometimes a man’s life turns into a cancer",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "From being bruised and continually bruised,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And swells into a purplish mass,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Like growths on stalks of corn.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Here was I, a carpenter, mired in a bog of life",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Into which I walked, thinking it was a meadow,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "With a slattern for a wife, and poor Minerva, my daughter,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Whom you tormented and drove to death.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "So I crept, crept, like a snail through the days",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Of my life.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "No more you hear my footsteps in the morning,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Resounding on the hollow sidewalk,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Going to the grocery store for a little corn meal",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And a nickel’s worth of bacon.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}