Famous Single Poems/What My Lover Said
WHAT MY LOVER SAID
By the merest chance, in the twilight gloom,
In the orchard path he met me;
In the tall, wet grass, with its faint perfume,
And I tried to pass, but he made no room,
Oh, I tried, but he would not let me.
So I stood and blushed till the grass grew red,
With my face bent down above it,
While he took my hand as he whispering said—
(How the clover lifted each pink, sweet head,
To listen to all that my lover said;
Oh, the clover in bloom, I love it!)
In the high, wet grass went the path to hide,
And the low, wet leaves hung over;
But I could not pass upon either side,
For I found myself, when I vainly tried,
In the arms of my steadfast lover.
And he held me there and he raised my head,
While he closed the path before me,
And he looked down into my eyes and said—
(How the leaves bent down from the boughs o’er head,
To .listen to all that my lover said;
Oh, the leaves hanging lowly o’er me!)
Had he moved aside but a little way,
I could surely then have passed him;
And he knew I never could wish to stay,
And would not have heard what he had to say,
Could I only aside have cast him.
It was almost dark, and the moments sped,
And the searching night wind found us,
But he drew me nearer and softly said—
(How the pure, sweet wind grew still, instead,
To listen to all that my lover said;
Oh, the whispering wind around us!)
I am sure that he knew when he held me fast,
That I must be all unwilling;
For I tried to go, and I would have passed,
As the night was come with its dew, at last,
And the sky with its stars was filling.
But he clasped me close when I would have fled,
And he made me hear his story,
And his soul came out from his lips and said—
(How the stars crept out where the white moon led,
To listen to all that my lover said;
Oh, the moon and the stars in glory!)
I know that the grass and the leaves will not tell,
And I’m sure that the wind, precious rover,
Will carry my secret so safely and well
That no being shall ever discover
One word of the many that rapidly fell
From the soul-speaking lips of my lover;
And the moon and the stars that looked over
Shall never reveal what a fairy-like spell
They wove round about us that night in the dell,
In the path through the dew-laden clover,
Nor echo the whispers that made my heart swell
As they fell from the lips of my lover.
WHAT MY LOVER SAID
No theory is too far-fetched to find adherents. Indeed, the more absurd it is the firmer seems to be its hold on its disciples, who usually end by exalting it into a cult. The Bacon–Shakespeare controversy[1] long ago passed into this stage. Its apostles are few but devoted. Their belief is founded not upon reason but upon faith—the firmest of all foundations.
Fifty or sixty years ago, there were a great many people who believed that the Waverley novels were written not by Sir Walter Scott, but by his brother Thomas, ably assisted by Mrs. Thomas, who was alleged to be far the brightest of the three and to be responsible for such flashes of genius as the novels showed. Sir Walter’s part was merely to polish them up and market them. There was something irresistibly appealing in the idea of a talented woman being exploited in this way, and an elaborate theory was built up to prove that it had actually happened. The theory was founded principally upon a letter Sir Walter had written to his brother inviting him to send on a novel for revision, and promising to advance a hundred pounds on account as soon as the manuscript was received. Sir Walter himself refers to the controversy in the general preface to his works, saying that it had “some alliance to probability, and indeed might have proved in some degree true,” only as it happened when brother Thomas tried to buckle down to the work of writing a novel, he found he could not do it.
Forster, in his life of Dickens, refers to “a wonderful story originally promulgated in America,” to the effect that George Cruikshank and not Dickens was the real author of Oliver Twist; but, Mr. Forster adds, “the distinguished artist whom it calumniates, either not conscious of it or not caring to defend himself, has been left undefended from the slander.” Whereupon, to the astonishment of every one, Cruikshank wrote a letter to the London Times stating that the story was true—that both the plot and the invention of the characters in Oliver Twist were his—and of course there were many people who believed it, although the truth was that his whole contribution had been to suggest the character of Fagin.
If Cruikshank had been a woman, as Mrs. Thomas Scott was, and posed as a shy and retiring creature, wronged by man’s inhumanity but too diffident to fight for the laurels justly hers, there would have been no dearth of champions to espouse her cause and cast their gauntlets into the arena on her behalf. For such is the male protective instinct, craftily fostered through long centuries—frequently leading to absurdity and disillusionment, as in the instance about to be recorded.
On the 19th of November, 1875, the New York Evening Post published a poem entitled “What My Lover Said,” signed only with the initials “H. G.” The verses, which were concerned with love’s young dream, were tenderly conceived and deftly written, with that sentimental appeal which finds an echo in so many bosoms. So they became popular at once and began a career in the newspapers which has endured to this day.
Before long, some over-zealous exchange editor, assuming that the initials “H. G.” could stand only for Horace Greeley, affixed Greeley’s name to the verses, and gradually a legend developed to the effect that the poem had been written by Greeley years before—perhaps was even the story of a youthful passion of his own—but had dropped from sight and had been resurrected only by accident.
Horace Greeley had been in his grave for three years at the time the poem appeared, so he was not there to affirm or deny the truth of this legend, but it was given a certain verisimilitude by the fact that as a young man he had written and published some fairly creditable verse. Nobody, apparently, thought of writing to the Evening Post to find out who the author really was, nor did any one on the Post think it worth while to relate the true history of the poem. So for five years, the fable went merrily on without effective contradiction.
But on Sunday, October 31, 1880, the Philadelphia Times published a story which was destined to be the starting point of a famous controversy. This story, which was in the shape of special correspondence from New York, gave an account of an informal gathering of actors and newspapermen in “the Palette Club beer-rooms on Twenty-second Street,” in the course of which Barton Hill, the actor, had recited a lovely poem entitled “What My Lover Said,” with such effect that “when he had finished, there seemed to be a finer sentiment pervading the crowd, and the next order for beer was in lower and less authoritative tones.”
Questioned about the poem, Mr. Hill stated that it had been written by Horace Greeley, and had been given him by a friend who had clipped it from the New York Evening Post twenty-five years previously. Some surprise was expressed that Greeley should have written anything so exquisite, and Mr. Hill explained that all he knew about it was the Post had credited it to Greeley. He added that he had endeavored to trace the history of the poem, but had been unable to discover anything further.
A few days later, the Albany Evening Journal, in an editorial under the caption “H. G. and H. G.,” announced that it could give Mr. Hill the information he wanted, that “What My Lover Said” had been written in the fall of 1875 by Homer Greene, then a student at Union College, and that the fact that it had been signed only with his initials had caused it to be attributed to Greeley, the most famous “H. G.” in American history.
Both these articles were widely copied and warmly debated, and on December 8, 1880, fresh impetus was given the controversy by the appearance of the following letter in the Evening Post:
I have noticed that some discussion has arisen of late in the newspapers concerning the authorship of the poem"“What My Lover Said.” The New York correspondent of the Philadelphia Times writes that the poem was recited the other evening to a select company of actors and newspaper men by Mr. Barton Hill, who said that the poem was cut from the Evening Post some twenty-five years ago, and ascribed by that journal to Horace Greeley. Will the Evening Post kindly assist me now in an effort—it is certainly a laudable one—to do justice to Mr. Greeley’s memory by relieving it from such a burden of sentimentality, and allow me to confess, hatchet in hand, that the cherry tree was chopped down by me?
I wrote the poem in the autumn of 1875—I was then in my senior year at Union College—and sent it to the New York Evening Post for publication, as your journal had already published several poems of mine. This poem appeared first in the daily issue of November 19, 1875, in the semi-weekly issue of November 23, and I believe in the weekly issue of that week. In the manuscript that I sent to the Evening Post I had written the title, “What Her Lover Said,” and had signed my full name; but the editors, intent on preserving the sacred unities of title, poem and signature, and exercising, as one may say, a poetical license, changed the word “her” in the title to “my,” and eliminated all of my name except the initial letters H. G. It can be readily seen that wherever the poem went—and it was widely copied in the press—its readers, well-informed as to the authorship of “What I Know About Farming,” noting the rural character of each production, the similarity of titles, and above all the initial letters of the name, would jump easily to the conclusion that both were products of the same imagination.
Since the days when I neglected the study of “Differential and Integral Calculus” to write poor poetry, I have seldom been favored with the smiles of the Muses, and now, since entering into the active practice of the law, I fear that the tuneful Nine have entirely deserted me. But when I find my poetical children (pardon the figure, they are the only children I have), wandering up and down the land like “Japhet in Search of a Father,” there is still enough left of parental pride to acknowledge them as mine, and enough left of poetic honor to rescue others from the charge of their paternity.
The Evening Post, strangely enough, did not offer any comment upon this letter, but confirmation of Mr. Greene’s statements was quick in coming from another quarter. In 1875, Mr. Francis E. Leupp had been a member of the editorial staff of the Evening Post, but in 1880 he was connected with the Syracuse Herald, and in the issue for December 12 published a statement to the effect that it was he who had received the manuscript of “What Her Lover Said,” which Mr. Greene had mailed to the Evening Post, that he “had dressed it up, amending some trifling errors of word and punctuation, put what he deemed a better title to it, cut down the writer’s name to a simple pair of initials, H. G., and given it to the printer.
“The only reasons I have for bringing up the matter here,” Mr. Luepp concludes, “are to suggest what is the possible origin of some of the charges of plagiarism brought against modern literary men, to set the public right on a matter in which I have unintentionally deceived them, and to tender Mr. Homer Greene, of Honesdale, Pa., my heartfelt congratulations and regrets.”
It would seem that a statement so explicit as this would put an end to any controversy, but it takes a long time for the truth to overtake a lie (very often, indeed, it never does), and the verses continued to be printed as the work of Horace Greeley. Various papers even added editorial notes explaining that Mr. Greeley wrote the poem in 1842. Gradually, however, truth did prevail, Mr. Greeley’s name was used less and less frequently, and Homer Greene’s took its place. For a time it was rather the fashion to print the verses with the sub-title, “A charming poem attributed to Horace Greeley, but written in 1875 by Homer Greene of Honesdale, Pa.”
However, the end was not yet. In the winter of 1886 the Philadelphia News published an article about the poem, asserting that it had been written neither by Horace Greeley nor by Homer Greene, but by Colonel Richard Realf, the author of “Indirection” and various other poems, who had committed suicide at Oakland, California, in 1879. Again the controversy was on. Now that they had been reminded of it, there were a number of persons who were quite certain that Colonel Realf was the author of the poem and who wrote to the papers to say so. One of his admirers stated positively that the verses had been written by Colonel Realf while he was city editor of the Pittsburgh Commercial, soon after being mustered out of the Union service at the close of the Civil War.
Fortunately an authoritative answer to this assertion was soon forthcoming from Colonel Richard J. Hinton, Realf’s literary executor.
“It seems to me proper to state,” Colonel Hinton wrote in a letter to the New York Graphic of October 20, 1888, “that Richard Realf was not the author of ‘What My Lover Said,’ either under that title or under that of ‘My Lover and I,’” and he adds that the confusion probably arose from the fact that Colonel Realf did write a poem called “Sunbeam and I,” but that while, in memory, one might suggest the other, there was really no resemblance between them. “There is nothing that I can find in Realf’s poems,” Colonel Hinton concludes, “and I believe that nearly all he has ever written are in my possession, many of them being in the original manuscript, which resembles the poem in dispute.”
With this second claimant thus effectively placed hors de combat, Mr. Greene might well have supposed that his laurels were secure, but he had yet to cope with a feminine aspirant to his wreath—the most persistent of them all, and the one who proved most difficult to dispose of. She entered the field with the following astonishing letter to the New York Sun:
To the Editor of the New York Sun:
About twenty-five years ago I sent the subjoined poem anonymously to the New York Evening Post. Since then I have seen it extensively copied, as originating from your paper, and attributed to Horace Greeley. Of course I felt much complimented; but as the true author is yet unknown to fame I think it would be but tardy justice to render honor to whom honor is due by republishing the poem under my signature.
Respectfully,
- Mrs. O. C. Jones.
Accompanying the letter was a copy of “What My Lover Said,” which the Sun obligingly republished, with Mrs. Jones’s name attached. At about the same time she had written a similar letter to the New Orleans Times–Democrat, which had also printed the poem with her name signed to it, and from these two sources it started on its newspaper travels once again, this time credited to the Abbeville candidate.
Mrs. Jones soon discovered, no doubt considerably to her surprise, that her rival claimant was not the deceased Horace Greeley, who could say nothing, but a very much alive Homer Greene, whose friends quickly rallied to his defense. Such papers as were familiar with the evidence came at once to Mr. Greene’s support, and a few of them treated Mrs. Jones with a disrespectful hilarity which, as appeared subsequently, was very galling to her proud Southern spirit. It was suggested, among other things, that if the people of Vermilion Parish had not been so busy painting the town red they would have known that this particular controversy had been settled long before, and that if Mrs. Jones wanted to claim something that was still in doubt she should have entered her name for “Beautiful Snow,” or “Solitude,” or “There Is No Death.”
There were, however, a considerable number of romantic males who felt their chivalrous instincts stirred by this feminine appeal for justice, and who leaped, pen in hand, to the support of Mrs. Jones, though they must have deplored the fact that her name was not more picturesque. Among her most doughty champions was J. Andrew Boyd, who occupied an editorial position on the Wilkesbarre (Pa.) News–Leader. He started proceedings by writing Mrs. Jones “in the interest of justice alone and very pointedly asked her if she really was the author” of the poem in question, stating that “Mr. Homer Greene also claimed it as a child of his own brain.”
“Most assuredly I wrote the poem,” Mrs. Jones replied promptly, “else I should never have had the audacity to claim it as my own. Passionately fond of poetry, I scribbled from my earliest recollection, publishing but little, as I wrote only for my own amusement, shyly concealing my penchant for verse and usually selecting a far-off paper for publication, and unfortunately, with the innocence and thoughtlessness of youth, sent the poetical waif to an anti-southern paper. Several northern sages having so long monopolized it of course will not admit that the true author was a little rebel lassie ‘Way Down South in Dixie.’”
To any one familiar with the literature of such controversies, this letter would have been all-revealing, for it is the invariable boast of literary impostors that, scorning the commercial side of literature, they never write for publication, but only for their own amusement. Even to Mr. Boyd the letter left something to be desired, so he wrote again, asking for further details and enclosing a copy of a letter from Mr. Homer Greene telling when and where he had written and published the poem, and stating that this latest development of the controversy rather amused him. This brought forth a long reply from the southern song-bird, of which only a part need be quoted.
“Would that my fiery southern blood,” she writes, “flowed as icily regularly as Mr. Greene’s, then I should only feel ‘amused’ instead of exceedingly annoyed by the cruel sarcasms allowed by the liberty of the press. The poem has been compared to ‘a rose-bud fresh with morning dew-drops,’ and my keenly sensitive nature is pricked and torn by its thorns….
“I composed the verses just before the surrender of the conquered banner during a vacation spent at Port Barre, La. There was quite a romance connected with them; a vanished dream; for ‘whom first we love, you know, we seldom wed.’ I only told an actual occurrence in the simplest rhyme imaginable, for my lover was no myth, but an Apollo wearing a rebel uniform of gray.
“The poem itself will plead for me to every impartial critic for it is essentially a woman’s poem and could only have emanated from a woman’s soul, inspired by her first shy love….
“The poem was really sent for publication immediately after the cessation of hostilities. I was a mere slip of a girl, shy as a fawn, and only ventured to show my verses to my brother and an old bachelor cousin, now dead, who advised me to send them to a northern paper….
“In ante-bellum days there was no prouder name than mine, but I shared the financial wreck of the South. Frightened, widowed, and defenseless at having aroused such a hornet’s nest by daring to assert that the true author of ‘What My Lover Said’ was an obscure lassie ‘Away Down South in Dixie,’ I appeal to the chivalry of my native land to shield me from their stings.”
The appeal was not in vain. “What more can be said?” asks Mr. Boyd. “Does not Mrs. Jones’s statement touch every point at issue in the controversy? Her letter is explicit, straightforward, and to my mind carries conviction with it.” The New York Sun was also convinced and said so editorially. So, no doubt, were all the other chivalrous defenders of the shy Southern lassie.
Mr. Greene, meanwhile, had offered to present his home at Honesdale, which he valued at $15,000, to any one who could prove that the poem had been published anywhere prior to its appearance in the Evening Post in November, 1875. Mrs. Jones’s partizans claimed that she had won the prize, and that the house should be turned over to her forthwith; but Mr. Greene’s friends asked for a little more evidence, and another Southern woman, living at Raleigh, N. C, took her pen in hand to make some caustic observations.
“Mrs. Jones brings no proof whatever into court,” she wrote in a letter to the Sun, which was still warmly espousing Mrs. Jones’s cause. “Her unsubstantiated word, however excellent her personal worth, can not outweigh facts and dates. It may seem to her refined sensibilities somewhat narrow to have an equivocal auditor. Yet she should ask no more and no less consideration than is accorded other writers, even though doomed to live amid the fragrance of the magnolia and the melody of the mockingbird ‘Away Down South in Dixie.’”
Mrs. Jones, however, had finally been pinned down to the definite statement that the poem had been sent by her to the New York Evening Post in 1865, and, under the direction of the indefatigable Mr. Boyd, a careful search was made of the files of the Post for 1864, 1865 and 1866. The result must have been a severe blow to him, for the poem could not be discovered. He laid this result before Mrs. Jones, who replied cheerfully that she “was under the impression that it was the Evening Post, but if the files for that year had been examined without success, possibly it was not published there.”
And then she proceeded to recount another romance, previously unmentioned, with a “handsome young lieutenant” of the Union army, who had been detailed to guard her home. “I, being a hot-headed patriotic little rebel,” she writes, “treated him with lofty disdain, withered him with a glance of scorn, for was he not wearing the blue? However, we gradually became more social, until quite a flirtation ensued; we read poetry together and talked nonsense as young folks have from time immemorial. I even showed him some of my rhymes; he pretended to fancy ‘What My Lover Said’ so much that he copied it as a keep-sake and carried it off. [The italics are Mrs. Jones’s.] I cannot even recall his name, but perhaps this may account for the mystery connected with the verses.
“I plead not guilty to the charge of plagiarism,” she concludes, “and if my innocence is never proved, I implore, at least, the benefit of a doubt, if only that and nothing more. The sage of Highland Cottage may twine my laurel leaf with his proud chaplet, and as my own bread-winner I hope to retire once more into peaceful obscurity.”
And as a final proof that she really wrote “What My Lover Said” she sent to Mr. Boyd a sequel, inspired by the same romance. This sequel is entitled “A Twilight Dream,” and the first stanza is as follows:
Hand clasped in hand mid the clover we walked,
In the gloaming long ago;
The moonbeams kissed the peach blooms pink,
Coquettishly peeping to and fro.
How the stars blinked in the calm azure sky,
How the moon smiled down with inquisitive eye,
While the sweet south wind came prying by,
And the still hours of the night drew nigh,
Yet hands clasped in the orchard path we walked,
And—zoe mou, sas agapo—fondly talked
In the gloaming long ago.
Poor Mrs. Jones! Driven to her last defense, with her back against the wall, she had fallen into the trap which has proved fatal to so many plagiarists—she had tried to prove that she had written something she didn’t write by producing something she did write, with the usual result, which was merely to show her utter inability to distinguish poetry from doggerel. It was too much; her partizans, the New York Sun included, realized that the game was up, and most of them said so. As for Mrs. Jones, she slipped into that peaceful obscurity which she had craved and never afterwards emerged.
In a letter of recent date, Mr. Greene tells of an amusing experience when introduced to a prominent Boston man, some time ago, as the author of “What My Lover Said.” The Boston man regarded him with open incredulity, and informed him that the Homer Greene who really wrote the poem was a well-known business man in New York, with whom a Mrs. Safford, a friend of his in Boston, had collaborated in the writing of the verses. He had this story from Mrs. Safford herself, who had given him complete details concerning the work of collaboration and of her general friendly intimacy with Homer Greene.
“Up to that time,” adds Mr. Greene, “I had never heard of Mrs. Safford, but I afterwards learned that she had done considerable journalistic and some literary work. A little later, Barton Hill, the actor, was my guest over-night, and he told me about his friendship with Mrs. Safford, and about their mutual fondness for the poem, but he said that Mrs. Safford had never claimed to him any part in its composition.”
So perhaps the Boston man was mistaken, in spite of his circumstantial story.
“Barton Hill recited the poem to me that evening,” Mr. Greene continues, “and he did it exquisitely. Later on, Kathryn Kidder (now Mrs. Louis K. Anspacher) recited the poem one evening to a little company of us at the house of a mutual friend in New York. She did it only indifferently well, and she told me afterward that the presence of the author had given her such an attack of stage fright that she simply went to pieces. And she a seasoned actress!
“I might add that the controversy over the authorship of the poem has not yet ended, and perhaps never will. The verses not infrequently appear, even now, accredited to some other known or unknown writer.”
But that has long since ceased to bother their author!
Mr. Greene still lives in “Highland Cottage” at Honesdale, Pa.—the same cottage he once upon a time offered as a prize—and looking back from the summit of his threescore years and ten he can afford to smile at all that old trouble. The pleasantest part of it, perhaps, was that throughout it his role was merely that of interested spectator. His friends did the fighting for him.
- ↑ See the Shakespeare authorship question, and the Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship. (Wikisource contributor note)