Antigonish (poem)

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An empty stairway

"Antigonish" is an 1899 poem by the American educator and poet, William Hughes Mearns. It is also known as "The Little Man Who Wasn't There" and was adapted as a hit song under the latter title.

Poem[]

Inspired by reports of a ghost of a man roaming the stairs of a haunted house, in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada,[1] the poem was originally part of a play called The Psyco-ed, which Mearns had written for an English class at Harvard University, circa 1899.[2] In 1910, Mearns staged the play with the Plays and Players, an amateur theatrical group, and on March 27, 1922, the newspaper columnist FPA printed the poem in "The Conning Tower", his column in the New York World.[2][3] Mearns subsequently wrote many parodies of this poem, giving them the general title of Later Antigonishes.[4]

"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!"[5]

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....

Use in media[]

  • Father Brown, Season 9, Episode 9, "The Enigma of Antigonish", the villain uses the poem as the idea behind a plot mechanism whereby a, suspect being already dead, wouldn’t be sought for the murders of several witnesses that had given evidence that resulted in the villain’s past incarceration for another crime.
  • Horror fiction podcast The Magnus Archives focuses its 85th episode "Upon the Stair" on a paranormal entity inspired by the poem. The poem is mentioned and read aloud in the episode.
  • In the miniseries Gallipoli, Season 1, Episode 1, General, Sir Ian Hamilton recites the poem.
  • In the TV show Death in Paradise, Season 4, Episode 1 "Stab In The Dark", Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman references the poem while solving the murder of a distiller.
  • In the TV show Fear the Walking Dead, Season 3, Episode 6 "Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame (Fear the Walking Dead)", Madison Clark and other Broke Jaw Ranch dwellers find a conscious man with his brain exposed, reciting the poem out loud.
  • In the TV show Midsomer Murders, Season 5, Episode 5 "Worm in the Bud", Chief Detective Inspector Barnaby quotes the first stanza of the poem when mentioning the case he was working on made no sense.
  • In the TV show Sapphire & Steel, Season 2, Episode 10 The first stanza of the poem is heard three times in a ghost story about children trapped in photographs by a man (spirit) with no face.
  • In the TV show McDonald and Dodds, Season 2, Episode 1 The first stanza of the poem is spoken by two members of the Bath police force during the investigation of a man who apparently plummeted to his death, falling from a hot-air balloon.
  • In The Trial of Christine Keeler, based on the chain of events surrounding the Profumo affair in the 1960s, Dr. Stephen Ward - played by James Norton - recites the poem several times.
  • The movie Identity opens with convict Malcom Rivers reciting the poem, claiming to have made it up when he was a child. It's also one of the closing phrases in the film.
  • In the movie "The Haunting in Connecticut", Matt Campbell recites the poem to his cousin.
  • The poem is used in Stan Dane’s book Prayer Man: The Exoneration of Lee Harvey Oswald to allude to research that appears to points to suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as being the "prayer man", a figure standing on the front steps of the Texas School Book Depository during the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy.[6]

Song[]

Other versions were recorded by:

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ Colombo, John Robert (1984). Canadian Literary Landmarks. Dundurn Press. ISBN 978-0-88882-073-0.
  2. ^ a b McCord, David Thompson Watson (1955). What Cheer: An Anthology of American and British Humorous and Witty Verse. New York: The Modern Library. p. 429.
  3. ^ a b Kahn, E. J. (September 30, 1939). "Creative Mearns". The New Yorker. p. 11.
  4. ^ Colombo (2000), p.47.
  5. ^ Mearns, quoted by Hayakawa, Samuel Ichiyé & Hayakawa, Alan R. (1990). Language in Thought and Action. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 96. ISBN 9780156482400.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link)
    - Mearns, quoted by Colombo, John Robert (2000). Ghost Stories of Canada. Dundurn. p. 46. ISBN 9781550029758.. Italics and exclamation points.
    - Mearns, quoted by Gardner, Martin (2012). Best Remembered Poems. Courier. p. 107. ISBN 9780486116402.
  6. ^ Dane, Stan. Prayer Man: The Exoneration of Lee Harvey Oswald (Martian Publishing, 2015), p. 190. ISBN 1944205012
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