Never To Die!
Eliza Wetmore Ward, Poetry Album, 1850-1867.
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Eliza Wetmore Ward was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1808. Although not much is known about Ward’s life, much can be revealed about her through her book of poetry. Ward filled her volume – which she purchased in Montreal in 1850 – with her own poetry and reflections, as well as others’ poems. Many of the verses she recorded are attributed to others, some of them well-known (she copied the entirety of Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” in 1867), others not. Still others have no attribution, and these may very well be her own original poems. In a somber verse, “Words over a grave,” one of her unattributed poems, Ward writes “Did she sorrow to live? – When her husband was near / There lay ‘neath her eyelids an unshed tear; / But it trickled not til her boy drew nigh, / And asked his pale Mother never to die! Never to die -.”
