{
 "id": "edgar-lee-masters/mickey-mgrew",
 "title": "Mickey M’Grew",
 "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": 132,
 "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": 17,
  "n_stanzas": 1,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 52,
  "max_indent": 0
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "It was just like everything else in life:",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Something outside myself drew me down,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "My own strength never failed me.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Why, there was the time I earned the money",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "With which to go away to school,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And my father suddenly needed help",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And I had to give him all of it.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Just so it went till I ended up",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "A man-of-all-work in Spoon River.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Thus when I got the water-tower cleaned,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And they hauled me up the seventy feet,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I unhooked the rope from my waist,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And laughingly flung my giant arms",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Over the smooth steel lips of the top of the tower⁠—",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "But they slipped from the treacherous slime,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And down, down, down, I plunged",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Through bellowing darkness!",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}