Darby and Joan - Appearances As A Poetic Conceit

Appearances As A Poetic Conceit

John Darby and his wife Joan were first mentioned in print in a poem published in The Gentleman's Magazine by Henry Sampson Woodfall in 1735, original title The Joys of Love never forgot. A Song. Woodfall had been apprentice to Darby, a printer in Bartholomew Close in the Little Britain area of London, who died in 1730. The poem was issued again as a broadside in 1748. One stanza of this poem reads:

Old Darby, with Joan by his side

You've often regarded with wonder.

He's dropsical, she is sore-eyed

Yet they're ever uneasy asunder.

The apparent popularity of this poem led to another titled "Darby and Joan" by St. John Honeywood (1763–1798). It reads, in part:

When Darby saw the setting sun,

He swung his scythe and home he run,

Sat down, drank off his quart and said,

"My work is done, I'll go to bed."

Lord Byron referred to the old couple in a letter addressed to Francis Hodgson on 8 December 1811:

Master William Harness and I have recommenced a most fiery correspondence; I like him as Euripdes liked Agatho, or Darby admired Joan, as much for the past as the present.

Frederic Edward Weatherby mentioned the couple in the Victorian era. His poem "Darby and Joan" concludes with the following:

Hand in hand when our life was May

Hand in hand when our hair is grey

Shadow and sun for every one,

As the years roll on;

Hand in hand when the long night tide

Gently covers us side by side–

Ah! lad, though we know not when,

Love will be with us forever then:

Always the same, Darby my own,

Always the same to your old wife Joan.

They appear also in We Have Loved of Yore from Robert Louis Stevenson's Songs of Travel and Other Verses, published in 1896:

Frost has bound our flowing river,

Snow has whitened all our island brake,

And beside the winter fagot

Joan and Darby doze and dream and wake.

Still, in the river of dreams

Swims the boat of love –

Hark! chimes the falling oar!

And again in winter evens

When on firelight dreaming fancy feeds,

In those ears of aged lovers

Love's own river warbles in the reeds.

Love still the past, O my love!

We have lived of yore,

O, we have loved of yore.