Today’s Poem: Antigonish

Nonsense and the existence of non-existents

A haunted stairway? (Wikimedia Commons)

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Antigonish

by Hughes Mearns

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away!

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall,
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door . . .

Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn’t there,
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away . . .

Hughes Mearns (1875–1965) was a bad guy. Oh, not in any strict sense of bad behavior. Just someone who lived a long happy life and left a baleful legacy. A theorist of American education, he was a Harvard undergraduate who went on to direct education programs in Pennsylvania and Columbia University. A passionate extender of the theories of John Dewey, Mearns was a dynamic figure, just filled with bubbly ideas about how to educate children in the modern age. Only God can save us from the enthusiasms of such men.

Mearns was particularly the motive force behind the creative-writing movement: the idea that what our children primarily lack is creativity. The job of teachers is thus not to correct their mistakes or even to teach much new material. The fundamental task of education, he preached in such influential books as Creative Youth (1925) and Creative Power (1929), is to encourage children to be creative. Creative about what? That didn’t seem to matter.

Apart from the damage his long career did to education in the United States, however, Hughes Mearns once wrote a very charming poem. Around 1899 — a peak moment in the era of breathless accounts of ghosts, reincarnations, and table-tapping spiritualists — various news stories across North America were reporting on an invisible spirit haunting the small Canadian city of Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

And Mearns, writing a play for Harvard undergraduates, used the story to set in his script a rhymed passage about “a man who wasn’t there.” Hearing the passage from Mearns over twenty years later, Franklin P. Adams printed it on March 27, 1922, in his New York World column — with Mearns’s title of “Antigonish” (apparently pronounced by Nova Scotian locals as ÀN-ti-ga-NÌSH).

Because basically no one these days remembers the 1890s haunting of Nova Scotia, the title seems confusing — is it “antigonish” because it’s sort of like Sophocles’ Antigone? — and the poem is often printed now as “The Little Man Who Wasn’t There,” the title of a musical version of the poem that the Glenn Miller Orchestra made into a hit in 1939.

But “Antigonish” was Mearns’s own choice, and the poem is a charming piece for one of the lighter verses we run on Wednesdays. In mostly tetrameter couplets, Mearns turns a ghost story into a nonsense poem and a logic puzzle about the existence of non-existents.

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