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]1 thyself, The selfsame thing will be."
About the headline (FAQ)
View original text (without footnotes)Confirmed 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.
1 Bennett: "not to"Text Authorship:
- by Anonymous / Unidentified Author, no title [author's text checked 2 times against a primary source]
Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):
- by Richard Rodney Bennett (1936 - 2012), "As I walked by myself", 2004 [ mezzo-soprano and piano ], from Songs before sleep, no. 5 [sung text checked 1 time]
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