Mrs. Benjamin Pantier Spoon River Anthology

Mrs. Pantier gives her side of the marriage her husband blamed for his ruin. Where Benjamin claimed she "snared his soul," she explains that she was a refined woman with delicate tastes who loathed his whiskey breath and onion smell. She loved Wordsworth’s poetry; he repeated the common verse "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" She drove him to live with his dog not out of cruelty but because every aspect of him repulsed her. The poem makes a case that incompatibility, not villainy, destroys marriages.

It is "Mortality" by William Knox (1789–1825), a once-popular poem that Abraham Lincoln frequently recited and loved. Mrs. Pantier calls it "that common thing"—contrasting it with Wordsworth’s "Ode" (the Intimations of Immortality ode), which she considers real poetry. The cultural gap between them—she the highbrow, he the middlebrow—is one more dimension of their incompatibility.

Benjamin presented himself as a victim of a cruel wife. Mrs. Pantier forces the reader to reconsider that narrative. She asks: "suppose you are really a lady, and have delicate tastes, / And loathe the smell of whiskey and onions" and the only man you may legally be intimate with "fills you with disgust / Every time you think of it." Masters refuses to choose a villain—both spouses suffered, and both were right from their own perspective.

The tone is defensive, sardonic, and precisely articulate. Unlike Benjamin’s weary resignation, Mrs. Pantier argues her case like a lawyer—"But suppose you are really a lady"—inviting the reader to walk in her shoes. Her rhetorical skill contrasts with the crude physical details (whiskey, onions, disgust), creating a portrait of a cultured woman using eloquence to justify what looks like cruelty.

Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality ode represents high Romantic poetry—complex, philosophical, beautiful. Mrs. Pantier says its rhythm "runs in your ears" while her husband endlessly repeats a popular sentimental verse. The clash between their literary tastes symbolizes a deeper incompatibility of intellect, sensibility, and class that no marriage could bridge.