Poem of the Day: ‘A Riddle on the Letter H’

Catherine Maria Fanshawe (1765–1834) was widely known in literary society — and yet nearly unpublished in her lifetime. The daughter and heiress of a courtier in the household of King George III, she was a wit, an artist, a dasher-off of parodic poems, and among the most clever and wry of the political and social observers of her time. Her diary has been lost, which deprives us of some of what may have been the sharpest comments on her era, but her letters and a handful of poems survive. Her “Fragment in Imitation of Wordsworth,” for example, catches and parodies the Romantic poet’s most annoying traits, but best known is her occasional poem, “A Riddle on the Letter H.”

With the dropping of H’s in certain British accents, the joke of the poem is slightly elevated for readers in the United Kingdom, but every reader can see the H’s in the poem: “’Twas in heaven pronounced — it was mutter’d in hell, / And echo caught faintly the sound as it fell.” A fun, clever poem for the lighter Poem of the Day that The New York Sun offers each Wednesday.