As I walked by myself, And talked to myself, Myself said unto me: "Look to thyself, Take care of thyself, For nobody cares for thee." I answered myself, And said to myself In the selfsame repartee: "Look to thyself, Or not look to thyself, The selfsame thing will be."
About the headline (FAQ)
View text with all available footnotesConfirmed with The Real Mother Goose, illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright, Chicago, Rand McNally & Co, 1916, page 85; also confirmed with Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales: A Sequel to the Nursery Rhymes of England, by James Orchard Halliwell, London: John Russell Smith, 1849, page 11 - same as above but uses "walk'd" in stanza 1 line 1 and "answer'd" in stanza 2 line 1. Can also be found with further variants in Comic and Humorous Tales in Verse; Selected from the Most Approved Authors. To which is added, A Selection of Epigrams, London: Printed for Robert Wilks, 1818, page 363.
Note: see also A Colloquy with Myself, a later poem by Bernard Barton that uses some of the same phrases in its first and last stanzas.
Text Authorship:
- by Anonymous / Unidentified Author, no title [author's text checked 2 times against a primary source]
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Research team for this page: Emily Ezust [Administrator] , Mike Pearson
This text was added to the website: 2016-07-10
Line count: 12
Word count: 50