Expert: Stephen J. D. - 5/8/2006

Question
Hi

If you can identify the title and author of the following poem, you are nothing short of a genius.

"I know that people come to change... we'll grow apart. We'll pass, with age... And so our friendship is a phase. But how I've loved these days."

I found a 1993 British high-school yearbook at a jumble sale and saw the words at the top of a page. I wrote them down exactly as they appeared, so that I could try to find where they came from. Hundreds of web searches, e-mails and blogs later, I'm not much further on. However, there was one "sighting".

On "allpoetry.com", a 14 year-old girl from Missouri, called "lowridersgurl" posted a poem in 2003, entitled "Cause We Are Friends". The lines, for which I'm looking, are contained in the poem but there have eben a few changes. "But how i've loved" becomes "I sure have loved", for instance. She wrote another poem, called "My First Love", in which one of the lines appeared.

The similarity between "my" lines and "lowridersgurl's" poem is so strong that mere coincidence can't explain it. I guess the most likely explanation is that both the high-school yearbook and "lowridersgurl" took the words from the same source. The use of ellipses is perhaps an indication that the yearbook quotation came from a longer, published work. There is a chance that it's a song, rather than a poem. The "Missouri connection" suggests that it is American.

If you could help me identify the source, I should be very grateful. This has been a very long-running mystery.

Evie

Answer
Dear Evie,

I am sorry to say that I could not find the source of those lines, either.

If the lines came from a poem scrawled in a high school yearbook, then they were likely made up by the student who scribbled them. The language is very unoriginal, frankly cliche--not the marks of a good poet, at least.

In the event I am wrong, and the poem is a "real" work, then it was probably penned in or around the Victorian era (circa 1790-1900 C.E.). The style the lines are written is is characteristic of that period.

I hope I have helped some.

Sincerely,

Stephen