{
 "id": "edgar-lee-masters/josiah-tompkins",
 "title": "Josiah Tompkins",
 "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": 137,
 "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
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "I was well known and much beloved",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And rich, as fortunes are reckoned",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "In Spoon River, where I had lived and worked.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That was the home for me,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Though all my children had flown afar⁠—",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Which is the way of Nature⁠—all but one.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The boy, who was the baby, stayed at home,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "To be my help in my failing years",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And the solace of his mother.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "But I grew weaker, as he grew stronger,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And he quarreled with me about the business,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And his wife said I was a hindrance to it;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And he won his mother to see as he did,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Till they tore me up to be transplanted",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "With them to her girlhood home in Missouri.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And so much of my fortune was gone at last,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Though I made the will just as he drew it,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "He profited little by it.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}