Famous Single Poems

One-Poem Men

FAMOUS SINGLE POEMS

ONE-POEM MEN

One swallow may not make a summer, but one poem makes a poet. Immortality may be—and often has been—won with a single song. Nothing is known of Louisa Crawford except that she wrote “Kathleen Mavourneen;” William Douglas would have been forgotten many decades since save for “Annie Laurie;” William Shenstone’s name is kept alive only by his careless lines written at an inn at Henley. These are not, it will be observed, in any sense great poems; but they have one quality in common, that vein of pensive sentiment which, as W. P. Trent puts it, “finds an echo in the universal human heart”—an echo which Time seems powerless to diminish.

Not infrequently, out of a lifetime of metrical composition, out of thousands of lines produced with fearful labor, only a dozen or so survive. (To survive, be it understood, is to keep on living; and no poem can be said to live unless it is read and loved and quoted.) Blanco White’s sonnet, “To Night,” was considered by Coleridge the finest in the language,—and it represents the sum of White’s poetic achievement. Francis William Bourdillon has covered many reams of paper during the course of a long life, but a single sheet, the one on which he wrote the eight lines beginning, “The night has a thousand eyes,” is worth all the rest. “The Burial of Sir John Moore” lives on, but everything else which Charles Wolfe wrote has long since lapsed into obscurity. Two lovely quatrains, “A Death-Bed,” worthy to rank with the immortal two in which Landor laments Rose Aylmer, are all that survive from the pen of James Aldrich.

From the citation of such examples, which might be prolonged indefinitely, one is tempted to proceed to a consideration of how infrequently even the greatest poets write great poetry, or to an enumeration of the poets who wrote none at all—this last to console certain one-poem men who bitterly resent being called such. But this, however instructive and amusing, would be to wander outside the purpose of these papers and must be left to another time.

Robert Graves, in his little book, On English Poetry, evolves an ingenious theory about one-poem men. He believes that true poetry is the result of a sort of brain-storm, in which the poet, in a state of self-hypnosis, produces something quite beyond the capacities of his normal waking state—a diamond in the rough, as it were, with a heart of flame, but full of surface faults which require the patient craftsmanship of his waking state to remove. The professional poet, by long practice and quick recognition of the preliminary symptoms, grows adept in inducing in himself this trance-like condition, and learns how to invite it and how to yield himself to it—how, in a word, to “go under.” Also long practice has given him the skill needed to cut and polish the diamond thus produced.

But one-poem men are either born poets tortured by a life-long mental conflict to which only once in their whole lives are they able completely to yield themselves, or they are not naturally poets at all, but men who, just once, are driven by some force beyond themselves to express in verse a sudden intolerable clamor in the brain. And of course since they are not skilled craftsmen, their diamonds usually show many flaws.

This theory is well enough as applied to those rare flashes of genius which are recognized as great poetry, but it fails to explain one-poem men, because very few of them ever wrote great poetry. It is not altogether astonishing that a masterpiece should live; but, by some curious quirk, a mere jingle which possesses no possible claim to inspiration, often proves more immortal than an epic. “Bo-Peep” outlives “Paradise Regained,” and grave and scholarly men, after a lifetime of labor in their chosen fields, have been astounded and chagrined to find that their sole claim to public remembrance rested upon a bit of careless rhyme written in a moment of relaxation. William Allan Butler was a distinguished lawyer, but to-day he is remembered only by some lines of society verse. Clement Clarke Moore was a learned professor of Oriental literature and the compiler of a Hebrew lexicon, but his name has been kept alive by a nursery jingle.

Poets have always been the special sport of Fortune, which delights to play with them, to whirl them aloft and to cast them down, to torment them with fleeting glimpses of happiness in the midst of long nightmares of despair, and especially to condemn their favorite children to swift oblivion and to raise up some despised and rejected outcast for the admiration of mankind. Nobody—poets least of all!—has yet discovered the formula which will assure immortality to a poem. Mere size will not do it—the most ambitious edifices are usually the first to crumble. Neither polished diction nor lofty thought will do it—most deathless songs are written in words of one syllable on the simplest of themes. Indeed, it would almost seem that the surest way is to waste no time in laboring and sweating over the fabrication of a masterpiece, but to wander idly along the pleasant places of the world, seeking love and laughter, writing a song when the spirit moves, and tossing it into the air for the wind to blow where it listeth!

Whether the song survives is largely a matter of chance. Many people cherish the comfortable belief that a great work of art never perishes, that it holds within itself, in some mysterious way, the seed of deathlessness. But this is nonsense. The dust we tread is compounded of great works of art, and many lovely songs have passed into darkness along with the lovely women who inspired them. That some few live on is due largely to the “Reliques” and “Pastorals” and “Garlands” put together by the loving hand of the anthologist, who, industrious and undiscouraged, is continually assaying huge masses of very low-grade ore in the hope of discovering a grain of gold. Needless to say, many such grains escape him, and are carried down to oblivion by the sheer weight of the uninspired mass in which they are embedded. Sometimes, in turning over the old material, one of them is found, but many have been lost forever.

The poems dealt with in the following pages have no claim to greatness. They are, for the most part, curiosities, literary orphans which have flitted through the columns of the press, their parentage uncertain. They have been mutilated by brutal scissors, debased by stupid compositors and marred by careless proof , into mere pitiful shadows of their proper selves. To rescue them, to cleanse their wounds and heal their bruises, and finally to trace their parentage, is all that is attempted here.

It is the fate of almost every fugitive poem, as soon as it gains a certain celebrity, to be claimed by many people, with the most amusing and astonishing results. The question of authorship is one (among many) which the anthologist must decide, and the material upon which these articles are based was accumulated during the compilation of The Home Book of Verse. It has seemed worth while to gather it together in the hope that it will settle certain historic and more or less heated controversies once for all.

There Is No Death

THERE IS NO DEATH

There is no death! The stars go down To rise upon some other shore, And bright in heaven’s jeweled crown They shine for evermore.

There is no death! The dust we tread Shall change beneath the summer showers To golden grain or mellow fruit Or rainbow-tinted flowers.

The granite rocks disorganize To feed the hungry moss they bear; The forest leaves drink daily life From out the viewless air.

There is no death! The leaves may fall, The flowers may fade and pass away— They only wait, through wintry hours, The coming of the May.

There is no death! An angel form Walks o’er the earth with silent tread; He bears our best-loved things away, And then we call them “dead.”

He leaves our hearts all desolate— He plucks our fairest, sweetest flowers; Transplanted into bliss, they now Adorn immortal bowers.

The bird-like voice, whose joyous tones Made glad this scene of sin and strife, Sings now an everlasting song Amid the tree of life.

Where’er He sees a smile too bright, Or soul too pure for taint of vice, He bears it to that world of light, To dwell in Paradise.

Born unto that undying life, They leave us but to come again; With joy we welcome them—the same Except in sin and pain.

And ever near us, though unseen, The dear immortal spirits tread; For all the boundless universe

THERE IS NO DEATH

In Glenwood Cemetery, at Washington, D. C, there is a modest monument marking the last resting place of one John Luckey McCreery, and on it, under the dates of birth and death, appear the following lines: There is no death! The stars go down To rise upon some other shore, And bright in heaven’s jeweled crown They shine for evermore.

No doubt other tombstones scattered up and down the land bear these same lines, for they were once unbelievably popular, but the one at Washington stands above the grave of the man who claimed to be their author, who fought to establish that claim for more than forty years, and who finally died sick at heart, knowing that he had failed. There have been other men who have written one famous poem; but McCreery stands unique, for his poem brought him nothing but ridicule and disillusion. And no more striking proof ever existed of how difficult it is for truth to overtake error, once error gets a start.

For the lines which are cut on his gravestone form the first stanza of a poem called “There Is No Death”—a poem which has been reprinted in newspapers all over the English-speaking world, in hymn books and song books and school readers, in countless collections of verse, in legislative reports, and even in the Congressional Record—credited almost everywhere to Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer, first Earl of Lytton, otherwise Owen Meredith!

Now at first thought it may seem to be of no great moment who wrote “There Is No Death.” If Bulwer wrote it, it belongs to English literature; if McCreery wrote it, it belongs to American literature; but it may be pointed out with perfect justice that it enriches neither very much. Its importance, however, lies not in its poetic content, but in its wide popularity, for it is one of those semi-religious, semi-didactic, quasi-mystical, pensively sentimental poems which find their way straight to unsophisticated hearts; the sort of poem which orators on the Chautauqua circuit love to spout, and literary societies of Gopher Prairie to recite, and obituary writers of the country press to quote. It is, in short, one of those poems which are familiar to a far wider public than anything by Browning or by Keats. And, after all, however the judicious may grieve and the clever may sneer, that is fame!

It is too easy to sneer; let us do it justice. There is no poem in the language which has been spoken so often above an open grave, none which has brought so much consolation to stricken hearts. There is about it a calm certainty of faith, a serene courage, infinitely inspiriting. The persistent repetition of the phrase, "There is no death!" is in itself reassuring. It is, in fact, a very concrete application of the Émile Coué method of autosuggestion. Its simple and homely lines are intelligible to every one and echo a thought and a hope which are all but universal. It is a defiance and a challenge. Surely any man might well be proud to have written such a poem!

So perhaps the question of its authorship is not so unimportant after all. At any rate, it forms one of those curiosities of literature which are always interesting; and the whole story is here told, so far as the present writer knows, for the first time.

Three or four decades ago, Bulwer was one of the most popular of poets. His verses combined in an unusual degree the universally appealing qualities listed above, with the added zest of a certain spiciness. No drawing-room table was complete without "Lucille," usually gilt-edged and in padded leather; indeed, it is still to be bought in that form. Maidens and matrons were enraptured with the sad romance of "Aux Italiens," which had also a pleasant foreign flavor: the grand monde, Paris, the opera, the Emperor looking grave (or perhaps only bored), Eugénie with a tear in her eye, while the tenor sang, "Non ti scordar di me!" Editors of Queries and Answers were kept busy explaining the meaning of that phrase, and many editions found it expedient to carry a translation in a footnote. Jasmine (or what passed for it) became a favorite perfume.

Then there was "The Portrait," with its cheap dramatics, for all the world like a novel by Hall Caine or Marie Corelli; with its confrontation across the body of the dead woman, and the priest's face in the locket at her throat. Even Marie de Rohan, it will be remembered, found a certain piquancy in the thought of damning an abbé; how irresistible, then, must this situation have been to the simple hearts of the 'eighties and 'nineties! So when a sadly sentimental poem called "There Is No Death," credited to Bulwer, began going the rounds of the poetry columns, everybody accepted it as his without question, and it gradually found its way over his name into the most serious collections.

To be sure, it could not have been found in any volume of Bulwer's poems, had any one thought to look, and it lacks completely Bulwer's sophisticated manner. Also a fellow named McCreery was vociferating as loudly as the press would permit that he and not Bulwer was the author. But nobody had ever heard of McCreery, who was only an obscure government clerk, and everybody had heard of Bulwer, so McCreery was usually set down as a crank possessed by a harmless mania and dismissed with a pitying smile. It was just another instance of the old truth that to him that hath shall be given, while from him that hath not, even that shall be taken away!

There were a few who stopped to listen to McCreery's story, but he injured his case by setting forth at various times three versions of how he came to write the poem and what he did with it after he wrote it—versions which differed in important details. And if he was not sure in his own mind about it, how could he expect anybody else to be?

Before considering these versions, it may be well to give the facts of McCreery's life, so far as they are known.

John Luckey McCreery was the son of Joseph and Jane Luckey McCreery, and was born at Sweden, Monroe County, New York, on December 21 (or 31), 1835. Joseph McCreery was a Methodist minister, and the boy was destined to the same profession, but, as he himself puts it, he "became skeptical of many points of dogma regarded as essential by orthodox churches," and one suspects from the internal evidence of his poems that later on Darwin got him. At any rate, he gravitated to a printing office and into newspaper work, and in 1857 started west to seek his fortune, stopping finally at Delhi, Iowa, where he bought a weekly paper, The Delaware County Journal, giving a mortgage to cover most of the purchase price.

He was publishing this paper in 1859, and he continued to publish it during the Civil War, but he failed to make a success of it, and shortly after the war moved to Dubuque, where he worked in some sort of editorial capacity on both the Times and the Herald for twelve or fourteen years. At the end of that time, he managed in some way to secure the patronage of Senator Allison, who got him a long-desired appointment as stenographer to the Committee on Indian Affairs at Washington, and McCreery spent the remainder of his life at Washington in minor governmental positions. He died on September 6, 1906 (at Duluth, Minn., as it happened, after an operation for appendicitis), leaving a wife and two daughters.

He seems to have had a thoroughly unpractical character, and was quite unable to get along in the world or to lift himself out of the groove of governmental routine. Like many such men, he harbored various vague and grandiose schemes for the betterment of mankind, for he says in the characteristic "last message," which he wrote the day of the operation, "My only regret is that all the great work I have always contemplated doing for humanity remains undone. The bread-and-butter necessities of life have prevented my getting to it."

The controversy over the authorship of "There Is No Death" began in 1869 and lasted the remainder of his life. He had apparently claimed the poem as his before that date, for in February, 1869, the Dubuque Times published a caustic article ridiculing the claim. McCreery was at that time working on the rival paper, the Herald, and he replied in the issue of March 1, 1869, and there gave his first version of how he came to write the poem.

He stated that he had written "There Is No Death" in 1859, and published it in his own paper, The Delaware County Journal; that some time later one Eugene Bulmer copied the poem, signed his own name to it, and sent it to the Independence Offering at Chicago, where it was printed with Bulmer's name attached; that the scissors editor of the Farmer's Advocate, published in Wisconsin, saw the poem, cut it out and used it, but, concluding that Bulmer was a misprint, changed the name to E. Bulwer—et voila!

The second account was printed as a preface to a collection of his verse called Songs of Toil and Triumph, which he published at Washington in 1883, "There Is No Death" being the first poem. Here he says it was written late in the fall of 1862, and the next spring was sent to Arthur's Home Magazine of Philadelphia, appearing in the issue for July, 1863. "One E. Bulmer, of Illinois, copied it, signed his own name to it, and sent it (as his own) to the Farmer's Advocate, Chicago. The editor of some Wisconsin paper clipped it"—and changed Bulmer to Bulwer as aforesaid.

The third version appeared in the Annals of Iowa (New Series, Vol I, page 196) for October, 1893. It is much more elaborate than either of the others—and also probably much more imaginative. He reviews at length the mental processes which, during a long drive behind a slow horse, led up to the idea of the poem, the first four lines of which, he says, came to him "in their completeness." He labored at the poem during the following days, and finally evolved ten stanzas. This, he states, was in February or March, 1863. He sent the poem to Arthur's Home Magazine, which published it in the issue for July, 1863, and he gives volume and page (Vol 22, page 41). He copied it in his own paper, The Delaware County Journal, and sent a marked copy to a friend of his, John H. Moore, of Dixon, Illinois, who worked on a paper called the Telegraph, and who reprinted the poem there. It was in the Telegraph that the mysterious Eugene Bulmer saw it. McCreery says that Bulmer lived "somewhere south of Dixon," but he did not know whether the name was a real one or a pseudonym. Anyway, according to McCreery, Bulmer wrote a column-and-a-half article on "Immortality" for the Farmer's Advocate of Chicago, concluding with the poem and signing his name beneath it. Another paper copied it and signed it E. Bulmer, then a third changed the m to w, and the deed was done.

Now it is strange that McCreery should have thought in 1869 that he wrote the poem in 1859 and first published it in his own paper; while twenty-five or thirty years later he decided that he wrote it in 1862 or 1863 and that it first appeared in Arthur's Home Magazine. One may question whether, in 1893, after the lapse of more than three decades, he could really remember so clearly all that he thought about during that long drive. Also there is a certain insubstantiality about Eugene Bulmer; he does not, somehow, impress one as a real person.

But in spite of all this, there can be no reasonable doubt that McCreery wrote the poem—which was destined to be the Frankenstein of his life. In the first place, nobody else has ever claimed it. Whether Bulwer ever specifically repudiated it may be questioned—one would think that McCreery might have secured a letter from him which would have settled the matter once for all—but it is certain that it appears nowhere among Bulwer's works. Eight or nine years ago, the present writer had an exhaustive search made, because he himself, in the first edition of The Home Book of Verse, had attributed it to Bulwer. McCreery once offered to pay a thousand dollars to any one who could find it anywhere prior to its appearance in Arthur's Home Journal.

Investigation discloses the fact that the poem did appear in Arthur's Home Journal, as McCreery alleged. The set preserved in the library of Drexel Institute at Philadelphia has been examined, and the poem found, as McCreery said it would be, in the issue for July, 1863. It is in ten stanzas, identical, except for two or three unimportant words, with the version which accompanies this article. It is stated to be "by J. L. M'Creery," and, at the end, is dated from Delhi, Iowa.

It is worth noting, also, that McCreery did write other verses, and while none of them approaches "There Is No Death" in poetic merit (such as it is), they do bear a certain family resemblance to it. Songs of Toil and Triumph contains one hundred and forty-three pages and the character of its contents may be judged by a few titles—"The World Is Waiting," "The Child's Prayer," "Usefulness Better than Fame," "Voices of the Soul," "The Voice of Duty," "Lazarus and Dives," "Hearth and Home." There is a portrait of the author at the front of the book, showing a dogmatic and contentious face, typically Scotch-Irish. How it happened that he was a Methodist and not a Presbyterian is a mystery.

Occasionally during his long years of controversy he succeeded in convincing other people of the justice of his claim. His first triumph came in 1875. In 1870, Harper & Brothers issued a series of school readers, using "There Is No Death," and crediting it to Lord Lytton. McCreery took the matter up with the Harper firm, and after five years of effort, succeeded in having the poem credited to himself. In 1889, Lippincott's Magazine ran a series of "One Hundred Questions" concerning various literary matters, and question number eighty was about the authorship of "There Is No Death." After considering the evidence, the editor decided in McCreery's favor. But these were mere evanescent gleams in the darkness, and to the day of his death McCreery continued to see his poem attributed to Bulwer Lytton.

Besides involving him in endless strife and, as he says, killing in him all ambition to write any more poetry "for the public," "There Is No Death" interfered with his life in another way. In the fall of 1868 some friends of his at Galena, Ill., called upon General Grant, then newly elected to the presidency, to urge him to appoint McCreery as his official stenographer. All was apparently going well until one of the party was so ill-advised as to take a copy of "There Is No Death" from his pocket and read it to the old war-horse. Grant listened with a lowering face and at the end remarked that it might be good poetry—of that he was no judge—but when he became president he would need about him men who understood public business and whose minds would be on that business, while so far as his experience and observation went, a man who was good at making poetry was not good for anything else, and he would therefore have to decline to appoint Mr. McCreery. So the poet had to wait a dozen years longer before he was able to land a government job.

Once settled in this longed-for haven, which he was never again to leave, and freed to some extent from those "bread and butter necessities of life" about which he complained in his "Last Message," he turned with new vigor to poetastry, and in 1883 published his collected verse, Songs of Toil and Triumph. His family thought it worth while to issue a second edition in 1907, the year after his death. It is a book of 143 pages—a dreary waste from end to end. "There Is No Death" is the first poem, and the only one which possesses the faintest spark of life.

"None of the following poems," says McCreery in his preface, "were originally written for the general public. Most of them, especially the longer ones, were meant only for my own family and a circle of intimate personal friends; whence it results that many of them refer to a greater extent than would otherwise be the case, to myself, my personal experiences, hopes, beliefs, doubts, and feelings … Just how much of what seems personal herein is fact, and how much of it is fancy, it will be time enough to tell when I come to write my autobiography."

But that was another task which—like his "great work for humanity"—he never found time for. Instead he seems to have preferred to spend his spare moments tinkering with his one famous poem and trying to expand it, no doubt under the impression that if he could produce some additional verses it would prove that he had also written the original ones. He succeeded in adding six stanzas, which are reproduced in Songs of Toil and Triumph, but they are vastly inferior to the first ones, and his other revisions are all for the worse. What he evidently labored to do was to make the poem more "elegant," and he nearly ruined it in the . He was not the only poet to do that—Coates Kinney did the same thing with his "Rain on the Roof"—and, in spite of all his mistakes and inconsistencies and contradictions, there is no reason to doubt that at some time (whether in 1859 or 1862 or 1863 does not matter), John Luckey McCreery did sit him down and pen the ten stanzas of "There Is No Death" as herewith given. So let it be recorded in future anthologies, that his poor, troubled spirit may rest in peace!

Kaiser & Co.

KAISER & CO.

Der Kaiser auf der Vaterland Und Gott on high, all dings gommand, Ve two, ach, don'd you understandt? Meinself—und Gott.

He reigns in heafen, und always shall, Und mein own embire don'd vas small; Ein noble bair, I dink you call Meinself—und Gott.

While some mens sing der power divine, Mein soldiers sing der "Wacht am Rhein," Und drink der healt in Rhenish wein Auf me—und Gott.

Dere's France dot swaggers all aroundt, She ausgespieldt—she's no aggoundt, To mooch ve dinks she don'd amoundt, Meinself—und Gott.

She vill not dare to fight again, But if she should, I'll show her blain, Dot Elsass und (in French) Lorraine Are mein—und Gott's.

Von Bismarck vas a man of might, Und dought he vas glean oud auf sight, But, ach! he vas nicht goot to fight Mit me—und Gott.

Ve knock him like ein man auf straw, Ve let him know whose vill vas law, Und dot ve don'd vould standt his jaw, Meinself—und Gott.

Ve send him oudt in big disgrace, Ve giff him insuldt to his face, Und put Caprivi in his place, Meinself—und Gott.

Und ven Caprivi get svelled headt, Ve very bromptly on him set, Und toldt him to get up und get— Meinself—und Gott.

Dere's grandma dinks she's nicht shmall beer, Mit Boers und dings she interfere; She'll learn none runs dis hemisphere But me—und Gott.

She dinks, goot frau, some ships she's got, Und soldiers mit der sgarlet coat, Ach! we could knock dem—pouf! like dot, Meinself—und Gott.

Dey say dat badly fooled I vas At Betersburg by Nicholas, Und dat I act shust like ein ass, Und dupe, Herr Gott!

Veil, maybe yah und maybe nein, Und maybe czar mit France gombine, To take dem lands about der Rhein From me—und Gott.

But dey may try dat leedle game, Und make der breaks; but all der same, Dey only vill ingrease der fame Auf me—und Gott.

In dimes auf peace, brebared for wars, I bear der helm und spear auf Mars, Und care nicht for den dousandt czars, Meinself—und Gott.

In short, I humor efery whim, Mit aspect dark und visage grim, Gott pulls mit me und I mit him— Meinself—und Gott.

KAISER & CO.

The war which recently shook this planet and in whose backwash we are still struggling is habitually alluded to as the greatest in all history, but, so far as this country is concerned, the war with Spain, comparatively insignificant as it was, surpassed it in at least two respects: the World War inspired no poetry to equal William Vaughan Moody's "An Ode in Time of Hesitation," nor has it (to date) produced any sensation comparable with that which burst upon these United States on the night of April 21, 1899, when Captain Joseph Bullock Coghlan, of the cruiser Raleigh, rose at a banquet given in his honor at the Union League Club in New York, and recited "Hoch! der Kaiser."