During a recent stroll in Fort Tryon Park, in upper Manhattan, I spotted a green placard emerging from a tuft of purple flowers. Its white letters read:

Let no one say, and say it to your shame,
That all was beauty here, until you came.

I was enchanted to find a park sign filled with poetry rather than the usual mishmash of information, rules, and thinly veiled threats. And such doting poetry: the park, the sign implied, had not been entirely beautiful without me. (I never mind a compliment, even when it comes from an inanimate object.)

The lines were unattributed, and, like the recipient of a note from a secret admirer, I yearned to discover the writer’s identity. But, to my surprise, Google didn’t name an author—no single author, anyway. Various Web sites attribute the phrase to a British schoolmaster, to the Lancashire Evening Post, and to Rudyard Kipling. Travellers report having spotted it on plaques in Britain, the United States, Portugal, and Tasmania. The sentence had its day on the silver screen—a placard appeared in the 1942 horror flick “Cat People”—and even in literary studies. Chastising imprecise speakers of English, C. S. Lewis modified the phrase as follows: “Let no one say, and say it to your shame / That there was meaning here before you came.” Yet I could identify no source; the couplet appeared to have always existed, everywhere, like God.

And then I encountered, in a 1927 issue of the English magazine Commercial Motor (“at the heart of the road transport industry”), a page of gossipy tidbits called “One Hears—.” There I read that “where the average woman driver is concerned it’s usually safer to yield road-space than to expect it.” And, less troublingly, that “a writer at Shere, one of Surrey’s gems in scenery, has very aptly composed the lines:—

When you stray or sit and take your ease
On heath or hill, or under spreading trees,
Pray leave no traces of your wayside meal,
No paper bag, no scattered orange peel,
Nor daily journal littered on the grass;
Others may view these with distaste, and pass;
Let no one say, and say it to your shame,
That all was beauty here until you came.

There was my mystery sentence, closing the poem. But in context the couplet was not quite the accolade I had enthusiastically accepted in the park. This poem did not admire but admonish—and passive-aggressively, no less. Note how the initial warmth of the address “Friend” yields to the guilt-tripping description of the trash readers will likely leave behind. Note, too, the probability that, serpent-like, we will wreak total ruin in paradise (“all was beauty here until you came”). It was as though Mary Poppins had taken a class in versification.

Armed now with superior search terms, I Googled again and discovered that plaques bearing this longer poem survive in sites of natural beauty across England, from Linton to Cleveland Hills. I grew newly determined to identify the influential killjoy who composed it—and who, despite having reached a wider audience than most poets dream of, had nonetheless managed to sink into oblivion. (I had to admire her consistency: in the process of urging park goers to clean up after themselves, she had left nary a trace of herself behind.)

And so, following Commercial Motors eighty-seven-year-old tip, I looked up Shere. The town’s Web site (sheredelight.com) pointed me toward a tourism contact, one Tristan Greatrex. Shere was a modest place, I figured, and if “a writer at Shere” had composed a poem that later permeated the parks of the world, surely its tourism representative would know. I had confidence in Tristan Greatrex, too: his very name implied progress. For all that, however, he could not answer the question, and he dropped our correspondence with disappointing, albeit understandable, haste.

I urged myself on. A scholar I consulted, Alexandra Harris, connected the poem to the Holiday Fellowship, a British tourism organization founded just before the First World War: on plaques, the poem is titled “A Request from the Holiday Fellowship.” A contact at that establishment (now called HF Holidays) told me that in the nineteen-thirties certain walking groups affiliated with the Fellowship had put up plaques featuring the poem as a sign of their commitment to the company—but that, alas, no one there knows who wrote the poem.

Running out of experts to question, I began to question myself. Why did it matter who had written the poem? I didn’t even like the poem. Why not focus my energies on determining the authorship of worthier works? (“Beowulf,” say.) And why my obsession with authorship in the first place? Had I forgotten the lessons of Roland Barthes? Was not the author dead (in this case, probably literally)?

Perhaps I simply relished the riddle. Mysteries seem so uncommon in the electronic age: if the Internet doesn’t answer a question right away, the solution is generally to ask it again later. (Thanks to autocomplete, we rarely even need to articulate a query in its entirety; Google not only answers our questions but asks them for us.) The Internet has seen it all before. Yet the Park Poet, as I started calling her, had evaded the net.

Since I was having no luck with specifics, I turned, out of desperation, to context. What had inspired the Park Poet to pen those grumpy lines? The early twentieth century in Britain, I learned, was a time of trash and trash talking. The scholar David Matless describes a rise in motoring and walking tours that enabled more city dwellers to travel to the countryside, including members of the working and middle classes. The results, according to their upper-class observers, were messy: the conservationist and philosopher Cyril Joad described litter as “a grimy visiting-card which democracy, now on calling terms with the country, insists on leaving after each visit.” Harry Hardy Peach, the author of “Let Us Tidy Up (1929),” wrote that litter was a “flagrant breach of national good form,” a violation of citizenship itself. Efforts to correct these wayward Britons abounded, Matless writes, from anti-litter campaigns to an “Anti-Noise League” that “urged prosecution of the loud.” In this context, trash poems only make sense. My trash poem wasn’t even the only one: Peach’s volume features several such rhymes, including the Park Poet’s (which appears, naturally, unattributed).

With no answer to my question in sight, I decided that I should come up with my own. Recalling Virginia Woolf’s remark that “Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was a woman,” I had already imagined the Park Poet as female. She was self-effacing, strict, intelligent but conventional, married but without many friends. The First World War loomed large in her mind, and in the traditional rules of poetry, in the exigencies of rhyme and iamb, she found a logic that had gone missing from her world. In less than twenty years, German bombers would fly above the countryside she longed to protect from the everyday depredations of picnickers. Who could blame this creature of the early twentieth century—era of radical reimaginings, in poetry as in warfare—for chiding litterers with old-fashioned rhymes?

As for the history of the Fort Tryon sign, information is more readily available, but only slightly. According to the New York Daily News, a sign was first put up in the nineteen-forties, but the one I saw is only about fifteen years old. The original disappeared, inexplicably, decades ago.


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Abigail Deutsch’s work appears in the Wall Street Journal, Poetry, and other publications. She was a 2013 winner of the Shattuck Prize for Criticism.

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