Today’s Poem: Jenny Kiss’d Me

Say I’m growing old, but add, / Jenny kiss’d me.

Leigh Hunt in a portrait by Samuel Laurence, c. 1837 (Wikimedia Commons)

“Say I’m weary, say I’m sad, / Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,” writes Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) — “Say I’m growing old, but add, / Jenny kiss’d me.”

It would be hard to find something sweeter than what we have for Today’s Poem: Hunt’s 1838 “Jenny Kiss’d Me.”

Hunt was a minor poet, minor essayist, minor public figure, minor intellectual — a man minor at so many things that they added up to an outsized influence on the era. In “Jenny Kiss’d Me,” he produced one of the most charming poems of the Victorian age: a rondeau describing a visit to Thomas Carlyle’s house, where Jane Carlyle (1801–1866) greeted him with a kiss. Or, at least, Hunt called it a rondeau, giving it that title in its early publication. And it bears enough similarity to the 14th-century French form of the rondeau simple (growing into the triolet) — with its opening phrase repeated as the truncated last line.

As for the content, the surprise is that anyone would ever describe the famously prickly Jane Carlyle this way. (One contemporary wag suggested that the Carlyles’ marriage to each other was proof of God’s providence, for thereby only two people were made unhappy instead of four.) And yet, here is Leigh Hunt, calling her “Jenny” and delighted by her kiss.

Jane Carlyle in Spiridione Gambardella’s 1843 portrait (Wikimedia Commons)

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Jenny Kiss’d Me

by Leigh Hunt

Jenny kiss’d me when we met, 
    Jumping from the chair she sat in; 
Time, you thief, who love to get 
    Sweets into your list, put that in! 
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad, 
    Say that health and wealth have miss’d me, 
Say I’m growing old, but add, 
    Jenny kiss’d me.

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