Masters’ look into small town life isn’t the typical sunny side up, lackadaisical, happy go lucky view that most people tend to take when writing. Masters delves into the dirty laundry of the small town life. Showing to the reader what everyone knows through hushed whisper, yet refuses to admit as more than just gossip. In Elsa Wertman Masters introduces the readers to an immigrant woman working in a house for a man and his wife. When the wife is away, the man can’t keep his hands off of her, the end result is a child. Hiding her husband’s infidelity, the wife decides to adopt the child, since they have none of their own due to what I assume is because she may be barren, and say that it is her own. By the end of the poem Elsa admits that when seeing the child rally in politics as an adult she weeps, not from the power in his speeches, but because she wants so badly to scream out that he is her child. Masters only takes this story a step farther with the dramatic irony in Hamilton Greene having the now grown child talk about how much he is honored to have come from the family he did. That he inherited the very best of his mother and father, and do everything to honor them, as they have honored him.
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