Fifty-seven years ago a double murder in a Massachusetts village
inspired a local poet to an elegiac quatrain which, while perhaps falling short in some respects of the highest flights of Lyadas or Adonais, has undeniable qualities, as the least literary will be the first to recognise (and London playgoers in the past have recognised): Lizzie Borden with an axe Gave her father forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done She gave her mother forty-one.
What makes all this relevant is that whereas Miss Borden was never convicted, because the weapon with which the deed was done could not be found ( I take the laws of Massachusetts State on !rust), this month, September, 1949 (so Newsweek affirms), a carpenter working in the Borden home found an old dust-covered axe behind a false wall in a chimney recess. What does that prove ? Nothing at all. But it suggests quite a lot.
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