Hollaback poems – Maud Miller and Mrs Judge Jenkins

A couple of years ago I was doing some tutoring for The Brilliant Club in a school in Trafford. One of the things the students had to do was compare and contrast some poems.

There was a Yeats one about young love in later years “When you are old”, followed by Carol Ann Duffy’s “Havisham“.

The point, was, how does the latter poem twist your understanding and (re)-reading of the first. Inter-texutality etc. Some got it, others didn’t/didn’t care, despite my best efforts.

Well, chasing down the thing about the saddest words being “it might have been” I found the poem Maud Miller, about a judge (ergo upper class) riding his horse and getting a drink from a young Tess of the D’urbevilles style farm hand, and them both in later years thinking of the other and the whole sliding doors thing

God pity them both! and pity us all,

Who vainly the dreams of youth recall.

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: “It might have been!”

It got parodied by Bret Harte, brutally, with a wonderful cynicism. In this version, the judge turns his horse around, asks the girl’s father for permission to marry, and the rest is history…

And when the summer came again,
The young bride bore him babies twain;

And the Judge was blest, but thought it strange
That bearing children made such a change;

For Maud grew broad and red and stout,
And the waist that his arm once clasped about

Was more than he now could span; and he
Sighed as he pondered, ruefully,

How that which in Maud was native grace
In Mrs. Jenkins was out of place;

Be careful what you wish for etc etc