Waiting
in the original. But that verse was unnecessary and the poem is stronger without it.
“Some time ago a Rhode Island manufacturer printed the poem in a leaflet to hand about. I suppose doing that was a relief to him from the grind of business. I understand that the Theosophists swear by the poem. I hear from it a great deal. People say to me, ‘That poem has been more to me than anything else in my life.’”
The poem as usually quoted, and as Burroughs himself used it as a preface to his book, The Light of Day, has six stanzas, but as originally published in the Knickerbocker Magazine in 1863 (Vol. 61, page 201), it had seven, the extra stanza (the sixth in the original version) being as follows:
Yon floweret nodding in the wind
Is ready plighted to the bee;
And, maiden, why that look unkind?
For, lo! thy lover seeketh thee.
A few years ago Joel Benton wrote a warm letter to the New York Times protesting against the dropping of this stanza as an act of vandalism.
“This poem,” he said, “is one of the very few specific poems of the nineteenth century that grasps an idea of supreme importance and
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