When You and I Were Young, Maggie

Описание: James A. Butterfield (1837-1891)


Arranged by Daniel B. Ziesemer 


Performed by Daniel Ziesemer & Jacob Bernhardt


A Victorian favorite and an international success of the late nineteenth century, written from the true life experience of George Washington Johnson, a schoolteacher and poet of rural Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Johnson found is first teaching job in nearby Glanford Township in 1859, at the age of twenty. He noticed a special young lady, one of his students, and five years later they were married on October 21, 1864. Tuberculosis claimed Maggie’s life on May 12, 1865. As George Johnson walked through the countryside of Glanford Township atop a hill near a rural mill, he wrote this poem for his beloved from the perspective of looking back at a life that they never had together. It appeared in a collection of his poems entitled, Maple Leaves, where it caught the attention of a young American musician, James A. Butterfield, who sent it to music in 1866.

I wandered today to the hill, Maggie

To watch the scene below

The creek and the rusty old mill, Maggie

Where we sat in long, long ago.

The green grove is gone from the hill, Maggie

Where first the daisies sprung

The old rusty mill is still, Maggie

Since you and I were young.


A city so silent and lone, Maggie

Where the young and the gay and the best

In polished white mansions of stone, Maggie

Have each found a place of rest

Is built where the birds used to play, Maggie

And join in the songs that were sung

For we sang just as gay as they, Maggie

When you and I were young.


They say I am feeble with age, Maggie

My steps are less sprightly then then

My face is a well written page, Maggie

But time alone was the pen.

They say we are aged and gray, Maggie

As spray by the white breakers flung;

But to me you’re as fair as you were, Maggie

When you and I were young.


And now we are aged and gray, Maggie

And the trials of life nearly done;

Let us sing of the days that are gone, Maggie

When you and I were young.