Rock Me to Sleep
port in a compilation which will find a place in many libraries and be referred to for years to come.
Mrs. Akers has told the story of the controversy at the back of her volume, The Sunset Song and Other Verses, published in 1902, where “Rock Me to Sleep” appears for the first time in any of her works since its original publication in 1866. She points out how, besides causing her endless annoyance, the poem profited others much more than it did her. She received five dollars for it from the Saturday Evening Post and that is all it ever brought her, although it was set to music by thirty different composers and issued by fifty different music publishers, some of whom made a fortune out of it. It was featured by the Christy Minstrels, issued as an illustrated Christmas gift-book, printed on leaflets and scattered by thousands in the army during the Civil War, used in innumerable compilations, quoted in novels and sung in one well-known play—all without her consent.
In 1910, when the present writer was compiling The Home Book of Verse, he wrote to Mrs. Akers for permission to use certain of her poems, and her reply was extremely characteristic.
“I have no objection to your including in your compilation the poems of mine which you
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