Transcription
CATALOG NUMBER F&E 26
OBJECT NAME poem
DATE 1856
AUTHOR Washington Irving
RECIPIENT Miss Florence Jaffray
MEDIUM Paper, ink
PEOPLE
PLACES Sunnyside,
KEYWORDS poem dedicated to Florence Jaffray (later Woodriff) when she was
a girl and neighbor to Washington Irving at Sunnyside
https://archive.org/details/frompinaforestop00harr/page/18/mode/2up?q=washington+irving
Pinafores to Politics Chapter 2 (page 19)
Mentions poem and Florence's reply
“Willowbrook must have been very lovely in the days before I was born, with its flat colonial roof nestling down on the simple two-story building. It was a very old house. Washington Irving lived in before he built Sunnyside on an adjoining estate. When we children were born, a nursery there had to be, and so it was clapped on the top of the house, under a hideous Mansard roof. The rooms downstairs were wide and quiet, and seven French windows in both the dining and the drawingroom let out on the piazza.” etc. good descriptions of area
Page 22: “Sunnyside, Washington Irving's estate, joined ours by the western meadow, and when my mother and her sister were little girls, he made great neighbors of them. My Aunt Florence treasured greatly some verses called, “The Lay of the Sunnyside Ducks,” “humbly dedicated to Miss Florence Jaffray,” which Irving wrote and sent her”
Page 25: “Grandfather and Mr. Irving behaved to each other like affectionate schoolboys, and it was a family joke on either side the boundary line that when one had been to call on the other in the evening they were certain to walk back and forth half a dozen times seeing each other “part of the way home.” In the last days of his life, when Irving was growing feeble, he used to bring his chair and sit under a tree, near enough to our house to hear our family songs. Ballads and hymns of all sorts floated on the twilight air, and I daresay he occasionally caught fragments of grandfather's harangues about the uneven quality of the hymns.”
The Lay of the Sunnyside Ducks
Humbly dedicated
To
Miss Florence Jaffray
By Sunnyside bower runs a little Indian brook.
As wild as wild can be;
It flows down from hills where Indians lived of old
To the mighty Tappan Sea
And this little brook supplies a goodly little pond
Where the Sunnyside ducks do play
Snowy white little ducks with top knots on their heads,
And merry little ducks are they.
And high up the hill stands fair Jaffray Hall
Where a mighty chief doth dwell
And this little Indian brook flows through his / lands
In its own little rugged dell.
[END OF PAGE 1]
But the Laird of Jaffray rose in his might,
And he said to his wife one day,
This little Indian brook is an idle little brook
And shall no longer have its way.
No longer shall it run down to sunny side pond
Nor eke to the Tappan Sea
I’ll stop it with a dam and pump it up hill with / a ram
And make it work for a living said he.
It shall run in pipes about our garden and lawn
Making jets and fountains clear
It shall run up stairs and down stairs of Jaffray Hall
And into your bath room my dear.
[END OF PAGE 2]
Then the Sunnyside ducks they quaked with fear
And dolefully they did cry.
Oh laird of Jaffray spare our little brook,
Or we shall be left high and dry!
But soon it appeared that this brave little brook
Defied the laird of Jaffray’s skill;
He For though he dammed the little brook and ramm’d
The little brook / The little brook still ran down hill.
Then the Sunnyside ducks again plucked up heart,
And got over their quandary,
And the little brook still runs down to Sunnyside pond
And the Mighty Tappan Sea!
*2nd? Quacked.
[by a DIFFERENT HAND]
Washington Irving
1856-Transcriber
Kathryn AlexanderLanguage
English
