Nah: Another riposte to “Maud Muller”

[very short doggerel on things not done, in parody of “It might have been”]

Sometimes the most quoted line of a poem or other work achieves such breakout status that its relationship to the larger work (in some cases even the existence of the larger work) is widely forgotten. Such is the case with the much-quoted (or often slightly misquoted) antepenultimate couplet of John Greenleaf Whittier’s Maud Muller, which is familiar to many people who have never even heard of Whittier:¹

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”²

Less well-known is this riposte, from a parody of Maud Muller by Bret Harte:³

If, of all words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are, “It might have been,”
More sad are these we daily see:
“It is, but hadn’t ought to be.”

Which is witty—but another unhappy scenario!⁴ I think the famous line deserves a happy counterpart, don’t you?

In the spirit of Abbi Waxman’s quip in Adult Assembly Required⁵ that “The only thing better than canceling plans is having the other person cancel plans,” then, I offer the following doggerel (bereft, alas, of narrative context):

Of all gratifying
Words of speech or print
The most satisfying
Are “I coulda, but I dint!”

You’re welcome!

1. Full disclosure: I know Whittier only as the author of Maud Muller, and am really only familiar with Maud Muller as the source of this couplet.

2. Common misquotations include the following (and variations thereof):

The saddest words of tongue or pen
Are these four words: “It might have been.”

Of all the words of mice and men
The saddest are “What might have been.”

3. Continuing to be honest, I had not heard of Harte until looking up Maud Muller on Wikipedia.

4. And here’s another, from a friend on Facebook:

My mom has a cast iron trivet that says:

The four saddest words
That were ever composed
Are these dismal sounds:
THE BAR IS CLOSED.

5. I confess, too, that I did not know Waxman prior to Googling just now for relevant quotes about canceling plans. For the purposes of this post, I am a complete phony.