The saddest words ever written or said? It's a matter of perception.

 

    Out of the blue, I needed to read some poetry, which is weird, because I rarely read poetry, nor do I write poetry. I have penned a few verses mostly in song, but I am not a poet. Nevertheless, when an inner voice commands, I comply. So, I searched for a book I bought in my twenties, back in the day when I belonged to a mail-order book club. 

    After scanning several of my bookshelves, I held in my hands The Treasury of American Poetry, selected by Nancy Sullivan. I laid it atop the tall stack of books on my nightstand. 

    That night, I turned the pages to find few lines that held my attention. Undeterred, I plowed through the murk, knowing that in those eight-hundred and thirty-eight pages, I would find, well, I don't know what I expected to find, but when I found it, I would know. Over the next couple of weeks, I touched the poems of Anne Bradstreet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, only to wonder if I could possibly continue on this curious mission. 

    Then, I hit pay dirt.

    I turned to a section by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) and a poem titled Maud Muller. It begins:

Maud Muller on a summer's day

Raked the meadow sweet with hay.

    Cut and dry like straw in the field, the lines were easy to understand and rhymed. Also, I have an affection for hay fields and hay bales. 

    The poem tells the story of Maud Muller toiling in the field on a summer day and spying a gentleman on horseback trotting in her direction. The Judge, as he is referred to, approaches the stunningly beautiful Maud and asks for a drink of water from the spring. She blushes as she hands to him a tin cup of cool water, and she is so smitten by his handsomeness that she forgets about her tattered clothes and hay field appearance. In kind, the Judge is taken by her beauty, and for the next little while, they speak about the weather and their surroundings, the birds and the flowers. What the reader does not know until later in the poem is that the wheels in the Judge's mind are turning. This prompts him to convey a lame excuse and mount his horse and ride away.

    Maud's gaze trails after him, as she imagines becoming the Judge's bride, and how he would dress her in finery and even look after her parents and brother and feed and clothe the poor in the community. She goes so far as to see herself as the mother of the Judge's infant, a sweet baby who has the luxury of playing with a new toy every day. The stranger on horseback is no longer a stranger; he is the man of her dreams; her knight in shining armor. 

    As his horse climbs the hill, the Judge looks back and admits that Maud is the fairest he has ever seen. He does not turn around though; he keeps going, and she continues raking the meadow. Soon they are out of sight of each other, but their minds are burning with what could have been.

    Years pass. The Judge has taken a wife, a woman not nearly as pretty as Maud but highfalutin and more acceptable to society than a common worker, and Maud has taken a husband, an uneducated farmer and a far cry from an uptown lawyer. But even though the Judge and Maud are married to other people, their minds still capture a happenstance meeting, and their regrets linger in the form of unfulfilled dreams.

    Sometimes, it all comes down to what could have been, which is Whittier's point in the famous line toward the end of the poem: 

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

    Sad words, indeed.

    I remember reading in the memoir of well-known celebrity Dick Van Dyke, that he and Mary Tyler Moore wanted to be together, but they were married to other people, and they did not pursue their attractions for each other. He played down that revelation in his book by devoting only a sentence or two and leaving much unsaid, which is most telling. Unlike so many who rush to someone else as fast as their legs can carry them, they realized their commitments. The storyline and plot are not nearly as tantalizing as giving in to temptation, but their actions, or non-actions, are commendable. 

    Many years ago, at about the same time as when I bought the book of poetry, I worked for a forty-ish, personable guy. Despite a wife and family, he fell in love with a subordinate in her twenties who was also married. After a fair amount of office gossip and workplace whispers, they left their spouses, transferred to jobs in another part of the country, married and had a child, and lived happily ever after. 

    Stories like theirs are fairly common. Not as common are stories of people like Maud and the Judge, who show restraint and pull back, because they must for one reason or another. Their ending is not as happy, but alas, it presents only one perspective. Another caveat is that their dreams enhanced their lives and comforted their longings, for they carried the sweetest of memories; he, the image of the fairest face he had ever seen, and she, the handsomest man to have ever been in her midst. 

    This poses the question about living out a dream versus dreaming a dream. I make no predictions about which one is more satisfying. All I can say is that Maud's and the Judge's memories of their attractions for each other perhaps filled a sacred place in a quiet corner of their hearts, a place reserved only for a might have been. The Judge, with his fashionable wife at his side by the fireplace, would sometimes see Maud's hazel eyes in the glow of the marble hearth, and sipping his glass of wine, he often longed for a cool drink of water from her hands instead. Maud would frequently look to the meadow and see the rider on horseback again, and she imagined her home more grand and more comfortable than plain and unadorned. 

    God pity them, the poet says, for vainly recalling the dreams of youth, but I say the opposite. I say, rejoice. For we, who were once fair maidens or gallant young men, will treasure forever our might have been.