Today I’m feeling silly. Maybe it is because of the elections and all the muck and mire they’re raining down upon us. So I will talk about an author from days gone by. His man on the stair can be today’s political season. “Antigonish” is an 1899 poem by American educator and poet William Hughes Mearns. It is also known as “The Little Man Who Wasn’t There”, and was a hit song under that title. Inspired by reports of a ghost of a man roaming the stairs of a haunted house in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, the poem was originally part of a play called The Psyco-ed which Mearns had written for an English class at Harvard University about 1899. In 1910, Mearns put on the play with the Plays and Players, an amateur theatrical group and, on 27 March 1922, newspaper columnist FPA printed the poem in “The Conning Tower”, his column in the New York World.
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, 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… (slam!)
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…
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