Jenny Kiss'd Me

Jane Welsh Carlyle

 

 

Jenny Kiss'd Me

Jenny kissed 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 health and wealth have missed me,

Say I'm growing old, but add,

  Jenny kissed me.

 

-Leigh Hunt

 

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) is better known as an essayist, but also wrote poetry. The story goes that in 1838, Hunt, just recovered from a bad illness, visited Thomas and Jane Carlyle at their home, and Jane Carlyle was so happy to see him recovered, she kissed him. That portrait doesn't make Jane Carlyle look like the jumping up and kissing type, but I guess you never know...

 

I pulled Virginia Woolf's The Second Common Reader off the shelf for its essay on George Gissing, and one of the other essays is about Jane Carlyle and how she is one of the great letter writers in English. That got me to thinking about the only other thing I know abot Jane Carlyle, which was this poem.

 

Hunt called the poem a rondeau, though if so it's a simplified one. It starts with a refrain that's half the first line, and ends with that refrain occupying only a half-line. But a writer of the true French rondeau would have 'Jenny kissed me' as a half-line at least once more in the middle of the poem.

 

Not that it has much relevance to all that above, but I can't resist, while I have the Virginia Woolf off the shelf, quoting the final words of the last essay, 'How Should One Read a Book?'

"...the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, 'Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have been reading.'"