What My Lover Said
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
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