Hughes Mearns (1875–1965) lived a long life as a theorist of American education. A Harvard undergraduate who went on to direct education programs in Pennsylvania and at Columbia University, he was a passionate extender of the theories of John Dewey — a happy, dynamic figure, just filled with bubbly ideas about how to educate children in the modern age. May God save us from the enthusiasms of such men.

Mearns was particularly the motive force being the creative-writing movement: the idea that what our children primarily lack is creativity. The job of teachers is thus not to correct their mistakes or even to teach much new material. The fundamental task of education, he preached in such influential books as “Creative Youth” (1925) and “Creative Power” (1929), is to encourage children to be creative.

Apart from the damage his long career did to education in the United States, however, Hughes Mearns once wrote a very charming poem. Around 1899 — a peak moment in the era of breathless accounts of ghosts, reincarnations, and table-tapping spiritualists — various news stories across North America were reporting on an invisible spirit haunting a house in the small Canadian city of Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

And Mearns, writing a play for Harvard undergraduates, used the story to set in his script a rhymed passage about “a man who wasn’t there.” Hearing the passage from Mearns over twenty years later, Franklin P. Adams (who’s twice provided the Sun’s Poem of the Day) printed it on March 27, 1922, in his New York World column — with Mearns’s title of “Antigonish.”

Because basically no one these days remembers the 1890s haunting of Nova Scotia, the title seems confusing — is it “antigonish” because it’s sort of like Sophocles’ “Antigone”? — and the poem is often printed now as “The Little Man Who Wasn’t There,” the title of a musical version of the poem that the Glenn Miller Orchestra made into a hit in 1939.

But “Antigonish” was Mearns’s own choice, and the poem is a charming piece that the Sun offers as one of the lighter verses we run on Wednesdays. In mostly tetrameter couplets, Mearns turns a ghost story into a nonsense poem and a logic puzzle about the existence of non-existants.

Antigonish
by Hughes Mearns

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away!

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall,
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door . . .

Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn’t there,
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away . . .

___________________________________________
With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.