ROCK ME TO SLEEP
Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,
Make me a child again just for to-night!
Mother, come back from the echoless shore,
Take me again to your heart as of yore;
Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care,
Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair;
Over my slumbers your loving watch keep—
Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!
Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years!
I am so weary of toil and of tears—
Toil without recompense, tears all in vain—
Take them and give me my childhood again!
I have grown weary of dust and decay,
Weary of flinging my soul-wealth away,
Weary of sowing for others to reap—
Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!
Tired of the hollow, the base, the untrue,
Mother, O mother, my heart calls for you!
Many a summer the grass has grown green,
Blossomed and faded, our faces between;
Yet, with strong yearning and passionate pain,
Long I to-night for your presence again;
Come from the silence so long and so deep—
Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!
Over my heart in the days that are flown,
No love like mother-love ever has shone;
No other worship abides and endures,
Faithful, unselfish, and patient, like yours;
None like a mother can charm away pain
From the sick soul and the world-weary brain;
Slumber’s soft calms o’er my heavy lids creep—
Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!
Come, let your brown hair, just lighted with gold,
Fall on your shoulders again as of old;
Let it drop over my forehead to-night,
Shading my faint eyes away from the light;
For with its sunny-edged shadows once more,
Haply will throng the sweet visions of yore;
Lovingly, softly, its bright billows sweep—
Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!
Mother, dear mother, the years have been long
Since I last listened your lullaby song;
Sing, then, and unto my soul it shall seem
Womanhood’s years have been only a dream.
Clasped to your heart in a loving embrace,
With your light lashes just sweeping my face,
Never hereafter to wake or to weep—
Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!
ROCK ME TO SLEEP
Much has been written about the sleeping sickness and the dengue fever; a vast organization is grappling with the hookworm; the economic losses occasioned by all three have given rise to the direst forebodings. But they are as nothing beside the mania for scribbling which devastates the land. Few people are aware how much time and money and energy are wasted by it, or to what depths of depravity it sometimes reduces its devotees. To have something published somewhere, to read one’s verses to an admiring circle, to be known as a literary person—that is the supreme ambition of countless thousands. No effort is made to combat this dementia; on the contrary, scores of organizations exist for the sole object of arousing it, fanning it, keeping it going, proclaiming loudly that anybody can write and offering (for a substantial consideration) to teach anybody how.
Since no law has as yet been enacted to put these instigators of crime in jail, and no serum is on the market for the cure of their victims, it may not be amiss to relate a moral tale, after the manner of Dr. Watts or Jane Taylor, of how a man’s peace of mind was shattered and a woman’s life embittered because the man, in the innocence of his heart, wanted his friends to think him a poet. And the text of this tale may very well be that justly famous couplet:
Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!
So to the story.
In the early sixties of the last century, there dwelt in the pleasant town of Elizabeth, New Jersey, a prosperous and respected harness-maker by the name of Alexander M. W. Ball. He was a devoted husband and father, something of a personage since he had made the long voyage to California and back a few years before, well thought of by his neighbors, and possessed of enough political influence to secure an election to the New Jersey legislature.
But the thing of which he was proudest was his reputation as a poet. He was always polishing off some verses, working over them much harder than he did over his harness, and nothing pleased him more than an opportunity to read them to his friends. These opportunities were numerous, since he always had some of his verses in his pocket or lying on his desk, and his friends never failed to be impressed. But if they solicited a copy, he would explain that the verses were as yet in a rough and unfinished state entirely unsatisfactory to their author. When they were completed, he would be only too happy to oblige.
If they urged him to have them printed and permit the world to enjoy them, he would point out gently that he was entirely indifferent, even averse, to the plaudits of the public, that he wrote poetry just for the joy of it, and that it would seem to him a desecration to share the children of his brain with any but his nearest and dearest friends. The said friends drank all this in with open mouths, and in time he came to wear in their eyes not only a laurel wreath but a halo.
One of these friends happened one day to see in print a set of six stanzas entitled “Rock Me to Sleep,” and signed “Florence Percy.” He recognized the poem as one of Mr. Ball’s—the one, indeed, which he was fondest of reading and which was admired most—and hastened to that gentleman to inform him that some brazen hussy was trying to steal his laurels. But Mr. Ball was not disturbed—his halo did not even quiver. It mattered not to him, he explained, who got the credit for the verses; he had had the pleasure of writing them, and that was enough. Let Florence Percy, whoever she might be, go in peace—her conscience would punish her.
But to this his friends would by no means agree. Without consulting him they wrote indignant letters to the papers denouncing “Florence Percy” as a shameless plagiarist, and asserting that “Rock Me to Sleep” had been written by Alexander M. W. Ball. This finally drew a tart letter from Elizabeth A. C. Akers, published in the New York Evening Post for June 13, 1865, in which she stated that she had written “Rock Me to Sleep” in May, 1860, while sojourning in Italy, and had sent it to the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, which had published it shortly after its receipt. She had signed it “Florence Percy,” a pen-name which she had “mistakenly adopted when a girl.”
“I am certainly one of the last individuals in the world,” Mrs. Akers continued, “to take the humiliating position of contending in public or otherwise for a matter of literary credit; and so long as this question was merely that of ability to write the poem in dispute it was simply amusing to me.
“But when it assumes, as it has latterly done, the attitude of a slander, liable to set me wrong in the opinion of many whose regard is dearer to me than any newspaper praise could be, when I hear myself good-naturedly designated in society as the lady who pretends to have written, etc., it is high time to state the facts.”
This letter unleashed the dogs of war, which were further infuriated when “Rock Me to Sleep” was included in a volume of poems published for Mrs. Akers by Ticknor & Fields in 1866. The controversy raged in the public prints with a violence possible only in those days of smashing epithets and whole-hearted vituperation. The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Providence Journal, the New York Times, the Round Table, the New York Tribune, the Knickerbocker Magazine, and countless others, took a hand—or, rather, a fist—in it, gave and received lusty blows, and had a gorgeous time. How deeply all this excoriated Mrs. Akers may be judged from a letter she wrote Mr. Ball in August, 1867.
“Of the utter falsity of the claim,” she says to him, “which you have made to the poem, ‘Rock Me to Sleep,’ no two persons in the world can be so well aware as you and myself. You know that it is not yours; that you never saw it until you saw it in print. I know that it is mine, and mine only. Furthermore, you and I both know that your sin in this thing was not ‘involuntary’ or ‘clairvoyant.’ You have clearly proved, by parading before the world your so-called ‘original draft’ of this poem, that this claim of yours was a deliberately planned and coolly executed piece of villainy. So far as your influence reaches and convinces, I stand before the world guilty of falsehood and theft, combined in the most humiliating and inexcusable form, since the crime is not a crime of necessity, nor of provocation, but of the weakest and most pitiable vanity,” and after pointing out its further serious consequences for her, she asks him to repent of his wickedness, abjure his claim, and set her right before the world; otherwise she will be forced to bring suit against him.
Ball answered in a long letter dated September 6, 1867, in which he expressed himself as delighted at the prospect of threshing the question out in a court of law, and, in order that she might have explicit grounds for the suit, repeats “with an unqualified absoluteness, that you are not, and that you very well know that you are not the author of the poem published by you as your own, entitled ‘Rock Me to Sleep, Mother,’ but, on the contrary, that I am the author, and the sole author, of it; and I am ready to and do avouch it before God and man, here and everywhere, now and always, and in all forms that can give solemnity to statement, and bind the soul for its truth.”
Poor Ball! How far he had traveled since the day when he had ingenuously read some verses to his friends and accepted their plaudits! For his claim was not at all the preconceived piece of villainy which Mrs. Akers believed; it was something into which he had been urged step by step by an Iago who was always at his elbow—the Honorable Oliver O. Morse, of Cherry Valley, New York. Morse was probably not a conscious Iago; he no doubt believed all that he wrote, but unquestionably his own amour propre as well as that of Ball’s other friends was involved in the controversy—they had to prove they were right or confess themselves credulous fools—and his influence was as fatal to Ball as the real Iago’s was to Othello. It was Morse who set the final seal to Ball’s claim—committed it to imperishable bronze, as it were!—by writing a book about it, which was published by M. W. Dodd, of 506 Broadway, New York City, in 1867. It was probably at Ball’s expense—or perhaps the “M. W.” in both their names means that they were relatives.
This book was entitled “A Vindication of the Claim of Alexander M. W. Ball, of Elizabeth, N. J., to the Authorship of the Poem, ‘Rock Me to Sleep, Mother.’” It had an introductory note from Luther R. Marsh, of New York City, and a preface by E. W. Leavenworth, of Syracuse. It is now something of a rarity. The copy in the Library of Congress, to which the present writer has had access, was given to the library in 1912, and was originally a presentation copy from Mr. Leavenworth to a cousin, Mrs. Ella E. Day. It is an octavo of seventy-two pages, with a closely-printed supplement of thirty-six pages, and is surely one of the most curious items on the shelves of that great institution. The argument which it presents is perhaps the most extraordinary and impudent in the history of American letters.
“The two accompanying articles,” says the preface, “discuss a question of interest to the public, but of far deeper interest to Mr. Ball and his friends. The claim made by Mrs. Akers, and the publication as her own of six verses of his beautiful poem, ‘Rock Me to Sleep,’ placed him in a situation of great embarrassment. For nearly ten years previous to such publication he had from time to time read these verses to his many friends, as his own composition. They had often been commented upon, admired and enjoyed. He sought no reputation as a poet. He had never published a verse or permitted it to be published by his friends. He sought no honors from an admiring public. He neither wished his name blazoned in the public press, or his works offered for sale at the booksellers’ stalls. He found his happiness in the refined enjoyments of his interesting and cultivated family circle, and in the society of his many friends.”
After painting this touching picture, the writer adds that Mr. Ball was most reluctant to engage in any controversy with Mrs. Akers, “but the course to be pursued was not left entirely to his decision. His friends, knowing that there was the most abundant and conclusive evidence to establish his claim to the authorship, determined that it should be vindicated.”
Here, in a nutshell, is the whole plot of what, starting as a comedy, speedily turned into a tragedy!
It is given further elucidation in the introductory note. “Through the zeal of his friends,” writes Mr. Marsh, “his claim to the poem has acquired such publicity that he is now driven to the alternative of defending his right, or hereafter remaining clouded with the suspicion of having put forth unfounded pretensions. A man’s duty to himself and family sometimes calls on him to wage a contest he would else shrink from and abandon. These considerations, in a great measure, have been overcome in him by a chivalric forbearance toward his chief contestant, and she would have walked, mistress over the field,” had not the Honorable Oliver O. Morse taken the matter in hand and prepared the “Vindication.”
One can imagine the shudders which shook the unhappy harness-maker as this work progressed, his sleepless nights, his terrific labors to prepare his evidence and prove himself a poet.
But of all this, Iago was happily unconscious, or, if he suspected it, he regarded such weakness with deserved contempt. Undaunted by the reluctance of his victim, he proceeded merrily with his task. Ball’s halo was fixed so firmly upon his head that it seems never to have occurred to any of his friends that his reluctance to go into the fight might be due to something else besides chivalry and modesty; or if it did, they quickly put the thought behind them.
“The whole poem,” Mr. Morse starts out by saying, “may be ranked among the gems of American literature, nor is it perhaps too much to say, that as a plaintive refrain of filial love, it is not surpassed in our language. The lines of Cowper to his mother’s picture awaken the same emotions, but to a less degree than these exquisite verses, and certainly are inferior to them, as a longing and a cry that cannot be suppressed, for converse with the spirit of a beloved departed mother. It may be a question whether in Cowper’s day the spiritual atmosphere of England was not such as to render impossible, even to the most refined and acute souls, any such vivid recognition and perception of beloved beings in the other world, as are manifested in these lines.”
With which high proof of his competence for the task Mr. Morse proceeds with his case, using as his text the letter from Mrs. Akers published in the Evening Post, and producing (1) the fifteen-stanza version by Mr. Ball; (2) six letters from friends who believed they had heard Mr. Ball read portions of the poem prior to 1860; and (3) an elaborate analysis of the poem to show that it is all of one piece.
The story which this evidence is supposed to confirm is that “Mr. Ball wrote, or made a draft of the whole poem, except one verse, in the latter part of the year 1856. In February, 1857, he sailed for California, and on the steamers, on both oceans, he corrected and polished it, and added one verse,” bringing home with him the finished product of fifteen stanzas.
The letters were written in 1866 or 1867, after the controversy was well under way and at Ball’s solicitation. They can be explained simply by the error which most people make in trying to place from memory the date of a past event. One or two of them made a crude attempt at documenting the date, and it is possible that their authors did at some time or other hear Ball read some fragments which remotely resembled “Rock Me to Sleep.” Home, Mother, and Heaven have been the favorite themes of amateur poets since time began. All that any of them claims is to have heard Ball read his poem; not one possessed a copy of it.
William Dean Howells analyzed these letters in a review of the “Vindication,” which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1867, in a way which would be difficult to improve upon. He says: Mr. Lewis C. Grover, who would like to be Mr. Ball’s literary executor, is more definite, and says that he heard Mr. Ball read the contested poem with others in 1857, during a call made to learn where Mr. Ball bought his damask curtains. H. D. E. is sorry that he or she cannot remember where he or she first heard Mr. Ball read it, but he or she distinctly remembers that it was in 1857 or 1858. L. P. and I. E. S. witness that they heard Mr. Ball read it in his study in 1856 or 1857, and state that the date may be fixed by reference to the time “when Mr. Ball took Maria to Dr. Cox’s, and placed her in the school in Leroy,” and the pamphleteer, turning to a bill rendered by the principal of the Leroy school, “fixes the date called for by the writers in February, 1857,” at which time, according to the pamphleteer himself, Mr. Ball was on his way to California in an ocean steamer!
It appears, then, that these letters do not establish a great deal. We do not think that their writers intend deceit, but we know the rapture with which people listen to poets who read their own verses aloud, and we suspect that these listeners to Mr. Ball were carried too far away by their feelings ever to get back to their facts. We think them one and all in error, and we do not believe that any living soul heard Mr. Ball read the disputed poem before 1860, for two reasons: Mrs. Akers did not write it before that time, and Mr. Ball could never have written it after any number of trials.
Let us take one of Mr. Ball’s “Christmas Carols,”—probably the poem which his friends now recall as “Rock Me to Sleep, Mother,”—for all proof and comment upon this last fact:
“CHRISTMAS, 1856
And as time rolls us backward, we feel inclined to weep,
As the spirit of our mother comes, to rock our souls to sleep….
It raised my thoughts to heaven, and in converse with them there
I felt a joy unearthly, and lighter sat world’s care;
For it opened up the vista of an echoless dim shore,
Where my mother kindly greets me, as in good days of yore.”
Here, then, is that quality of peculiarly hopeless poetasting which strikes cold upon the stomach, and makes man turn sadly from his driveling brother. Do we not know this sort of thing? Out of the rejected contributions in our waste-basket we could daily furnish the inside and outside of a dozen Balls. It is saddening; it is pathetic; it has gone on so long now, and must still continue for so many ages; but we can just bear it as a negative quantity. It is only when such rubbish is put forward as proof that its author has a claim to the name and fame of a poet, that we lose patience. The verses given in this pamphlet would invalidate Mr. Ball’s claim to the authorship of Mrs. Akers’s poem, even though the Seven Sleepers swore that he rocked them asleep with it in the time of the Decian persecution.
It must be admitted that Mr. Howells twisted the letters a little to suit his argument, but he was entirely right in concluding that they “do not establish a great deal”—even though the names of their authors were afterwards made public.
At a later date the Hon. George W. Wright, of Washington, D. C., who shared Mr. Ball’s cabin on the voyage to California in 1857, testified that he had seen that gentleman working on his poem, that they had discussed some parts of it together, and that he had become very familiar with it. He had asked for a copy, but unfortunately Mr. Ball had not given him one, asking him (as usual) to wait until the poem was perfected. It seems that even after all the work done on it during the long sea voyage from New York to San Francisco, it still did not measure up to his high ideal of what a poem ought to be.
Ball’s partisans hailed this letter with a great blare of trumpets as absolutely conclusive; but there is only one inference to be drawn from it (aside from the unfair one that it is a fabrication), and that is that Ball, as was his custom, was ostentatiously posing as a poet and tinkering at some doggerel during the voyage in order to impress his shipmates, and that Mr. Wright’s imagination, after a lapse of more than ten years, did the rest.
That it was doggerel there can be no question, if one is to judge by the other specimens of Ball’s versification included in the book, but before going into that, Mr. Morse’s final and conclusive proof must be examined. “This,” says he, “is to be found in the poem itself,” the fifteen stanzas of which, he points out, “belong to the same one exquisite mosaic.”
One of the commonest devices of the literary thief is to write some additional stanzas to the poem he has stolen in order to prove that he wrote all of them. It is also one of the most perilous, for seldom indeed can the pretender duplicate the flavor of the original. In Mr. Ball’s case it is fatal. Mrs. Akers’s “Rock Me to Sleep” is very far from being a great poem, but at least it shows rather unusual skill in versification, its lines are smooth and flowing, and each of them possesses the requisite number of feet. There are felicitous passages, a happy use of adjectives, and an avoidance of stilted or artificial phraseology. Mr. Ball’s additional stanzas do not possess a single one of these merits. They are uncouth, ungrammatical, in places almost unintelligible. Here is his last stanza, which Mr. Morse calls “a natural, simple, and harmonious finale to the whole:”
Thus with my loved ones I’ll watch by your side,
Nor weep once again, whatever betide,
Waiting all calmly the coming of those
Holding the signet of death’s cold repose;—
Farewell to sorrow—farewell to all ill—
Whispers are stealing, sad heart be now still,—
With my dear mother, kind watch I will keep.
She charges the angels to rock me to sleep.
Surely no comment upon this is necessary; but with Mr. Ball’s claim resting upon such evidence, there can be only one verdict, and all the affidavits in the world could not alter it. The blood-test proves conclusively that Mr. Ball could never have been the parent of the stanzas claimed by Mrs. Akers.
Mr. Morse, in spite of his laudation of Mr. Ball’s stanzas, seems to have had some dim perception of this, for he adds, “On the theory that the whole had been lost by the author, the finder, if disposed to appropriate it, would naturally publish only those verses which did not so plainly repeat themselves, selecting only the best. The very fact then of this peculiarity, or defect, if it is one, must be taken as proof that the whole is the work of one mind!”
This is sublime, but it is far from being Mr. Morse’s best. He easily surpasses it when he proceeds to a dissection of the internal evidence of the poem itself. He points out that one of the lines stolen by Mrs. Akers is:
Come, let your brown hair just lighted with gold,
and that there can be no doubt Mr. Ball wrote it, because his mother had exactly such hair, as Mr. Morse himself can testify, for he has seen a tress of it, piously preserved by her son. Furthermore, consider these lines, also stolen by Mrs. Akers:
Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care,
Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair.
Mr. Morse testifies that Mr. Ball’s forehead was furrowed (as well it might be!) and that there were “silver threads in his hair not a few.” He had never seen Mrs. Akers, but she subsequently gave herself completely away in the following damning stanza in a poem referring to her early widowhood:
Ah, me! the red is yet upon my cheek,
And in my veins life’s vigorous currents play;
Adown my hair there shines no warning streak,
And the sweet meeting which you paint to-day
Seems sadly far away.
How, demands Mr. Morse triumphantly, was it possible for Mrs. Akers to be wrinkled and gray-haired in 1860, and blooming with youth some years later? Here is the conclusive, inescapable proof of the falsity of her high-handed claim to “Rock Me to Sleep!”
Nor is this all. If any one is so pig-headed as to be still unconvinced, there is one proof more. Mr. Ball, it seems, was in the habit of writing a poem to his mother’s memory to celebrate each succeeding Christmas. They were really not poems, just fragments, for Mr. Ball seemed always to have a great deal of difficulty with his material, but the fragments for 1852, 1853, 1854, 1855, and 1856 were fortunately preserved and are given in the book, and for good measure certain other of Mr. Ball’s verses are included. Unhappily, one of these poems was afterwards discovered to be a plagiarism from Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, for which Mr. Ball apologized, saying that all unconsciously Mrs. Whitman’s poem “became interwoven into my heart and mind, and, years after, found utterance as my own.” The other poems are strangely reminiscent of Goldsmith and Hood, but it would scarcely be fair to characterize them as anything worse than that. All of them are unmitigated doggerel, the sample quoted by Mr. Howells from the effusion for 1856 being a fair specimen.
One can imagine the poor man racking his brain in the effort to satisfy his friends that he was all they thought him, and as a final bit of evidence producing the “original draft” of “Rock Me to Sleep,” with all his subsequent corrections and interlineations. It was a thoroughly puerile performance, but it was gravely examined by a solemn committee of clergymen, doctors, and literary men, among the latter being “Mr. Gilder, editor of the Newark Daily Advertiser.” Their verdict is not disclosed, but, as Mr. Morse points out, there could be no doubt about the date of this interesting document because, as was discovered to its author’s great surprise, a portion of the draft had, by a most fortunate chance, been written upon the back of a “tradesman’s bill rendered to Mr. Ball in September, 1856. Where so many bills are presented and paid as in Mr. Ball’s house, the presumption is that this one was thus used by him, about the time of its presentation.”
There remained one more link to be forged in the chain of evidence: it must be shown how Mrs. Akers, who was in Italy during the winter of 1859–1860, got hold of a poem which Mr. Ball had brought back with him from California a year or so before, and which had never been published, or, presumably, been out of his possession. This was decidedly difficult, but Mr. Morse did not falter:
“Mr. Ball himself, with the most naïve benevolence and kindness of heart, asked whether there might not be some occult psychological process by which Mrs. Akers could have possessed herself, unconsciously, of these verses from his mind or manuscript.” Iago does not altogether deny the possibility of this (though Mrs. Akers rejected it scornfully), but he has another and more material explanation.
“Mr. Ball,” he writes, “is very careless of his manuscript poems. When he travels he often carries them in loose sheets of note paper in his pockets. They lie scattered on his table. Formerly he had a clerk, now deceased, who used to copy for himself many of the verses. Mrs. Akers sojourned for a while in New Hampshire, and Mr. Ball’s business often carried him there, though they never met. In a way here hinted at, or in some other, ‘Rock Me to Sleep,’ or part of it perhaps was lost, got into some country newspaper, and floated before the eye, and into the memory and poetical soul of Mrs. Akers, before she went to Italy.”
And upon this lame note the “Vindication” ends.
Surely, if any man in this world ever had reason to pray to be delivered from his loving friends it was Alexander M. W. Ball, of Elizabeth, New Jersey!
Mrs. Akers, meanwhile, had also been having her troubles.
There are in the world a lot of people always ready to believe any theory, however far-fetched. In fact, their intensity of belief seems to be in direct proportion to its absurdity, and they even assume a certain superiority, as belonging to an inner circle of intelligentsia. So in any public assembly where she might appear Mrs. Akers was conscious of lifted eyebrows and ironical smiles, and could guess what was being whispered behind her back. “But, my dear, I assure you it is true—she stole it bodily—yes, a Mr, Ball—a wonderful man, so high-minded and chivalrous…”
Small wonder she sometimes lost her temper and wrote and said some exceedingly biting things about Mr. Ball and his friends, but fortunately she had the good sense not to bring suit, as she had threatened. When William Cullen Bryant was compiling his Library of Poetry and Song, he wrote to Mrs. Akers and asked her to show cause why the poem should not be credited to the Elizabeth bard. Mrs. Akers tartly replied that there was only one reason, to wit: Mr. Ball did not write the poem and she did. This seems to have convinced Mr. Bryant, for when his collection was published the poem was credited to Florence Percy. J. T. Trowbridge came to her defense, as did the Atlantic and The Nation, and gradually the weight of expert opinion rallied behind her, and Mr. Ball and Iago and all the rest of them faded from public memory, until the whole controversy became just another literary curiosity—and a warning to plagiarists who seek to impress their admiring acquaintances!
Even yet, from time to time, its ghost flits feebly across the stage. Its most recent appearance is in the new edition of Hoyt’s Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations, edited by Kate Louise Roberts. Miss Roberts has evidently been taken in by the same old hokum, for she credits the poem to Mr. Ball, and gives as her authority an article which appeared in the Northern Monthly in 1868. The Northern Monthly was published at Newark, N. J., which happens also to be Miss Roberts’s home, and this perhaps caused her to give it more weight than it deserves. But it is unfortunate that a claim so shameless and mendacious should receive support 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 mention,” she writes, “if you will observe two conditions, first, that you will copy them from my books instead of from possibly garbled newspaper versions, and second, that you will credit the authorship to the name of Elizabeth Akers, which is the name given on all my title-pages, and the only one which I wish to be associated with my literary work.
“You mention a poem by the title of ‘The Old Story.’ I do not recall that I ever gave that title to any poem, but it is possible that I may have written something that might suggest that title, and some unco’ wise newspaper editor has taken the liberty of changing its name—a liberty that is sometimes taken with poems, but which is an affront to their authors, who may be supposed to know what name they prefer for their own work. If you will tell me the first two lines of ‘The Old Story’ I can at once decide whether the poem is mine. Of all things, I wish to avoid being credited with work that does not belong to me. It is even more unpleasant than seeing my own work stolen, as has happened many times.”
So even to the end of her days the old wrong rankled in her recollection. As her publishers remark, “Truth has outlived falsehood, and the unjust claims of other years are but a cruel memory.” But surely never did another poem so overshadow two lives!