Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/320

 Greene’s, then I should only feel ‘amused’ instead of exceedingly annoyed by the cruel sarcasms allowed by the liberty of the press. The poem has been compared to ‘a rose-bud fresh with morning dew-drops,’ and my keenly sensitive nature is pricked and torn by its thorns….

“I composed the verses just before the surrender of the conquered banner during a vacation spent at Port Barre, La. There was quite a romance connected with them; a vanished dream; for ‘whom first we love, you know, we seldom wed.’ I only told an actual occurrence in the simplest rhyme imaginable, for my lover was no myth, but an Apollo wearing a rebel uniform of gray.

“The poem itself will plead for me to every impartial critic for it is essentially a woman’s poem and could only have emanated from a woman’s soul, inspired by her first shy love….

“The poem was really sent for publication immediately after the cessation of hostilities. I was a mere slip of a girl, shy as a fawn, and only ventured to show my verses to my brother and an old bachelor cousin, now dead, who advised me to send them to a northern paper….

“In ante-bellum days there was no prouder name than mine, but I shared the financial wreck of the South. Frightened, widowed, and defenseless at having aroused such a hornet’s nest by daring to assert that the true author of