I run a question-and-answer column for the Sunday Plain Dealer's Roto magazine. Recently an item appeared which bestirred a dozen or more readers who identified for me your poem "Let me live out my years."
I thought you might like to know that some of the readers sent me copies of your poem, and stated that it was a favorite of theirs. I now number it among my favorites, too, & feel rather stupid that I didn't know it before.
Would you be willing to autograph the enclosed copy? I'd like to frame it for my den. All the best, with my deepest thanks & appreciation. —
John Huth Jr
Let Me Live Out My Years
Now You Know
June 2, 1968=PLAINDEALER, CLEVE.O.
Q. Hotel Auditorium's dining room more than 20 years ago had a wall plaque of which this was a part: "Like a candlelight snuffed out in the heyday of its glow, Thus would I go." What was the rest, and who wrote it?--J.R.P., Mentor.
A. We've hunted for the answer for many months, without getting a candlepower glimmer. And Charles E. Borcher, the hotel's resident manager, says he doesn't know, either, adding that Mary Gergely, a waitress there 30 years, recalls there was such a quotation. It was removed when the Chalet Room was remodeled 14 years ago.
"LET ME GO QUICKLY--" A Poem, once dis-played in Hotel Auditorium's Chalet Room and sought by a reader in the June 2 NYK has been identified as part of John G. Neihardt's "Let Me Live Out My Years," from "A Bundle of Myrrh" (1907) and reprinted in his "Collected Poems" (1926). JUNE 26, '68
Lincoln Cahn, Geneva, recalls that the wall plaque at the hotel used the title "The Prayer of Youth." Other readers identifying the striking verse included Mrs. John H. Brenneman, Greenville, Pa.; Mrs. Gerald W. Bunyan, Avon; R. G. Geiger Jr., North Canton, and Dawson Kelly and Robert Barnett.
Office address of Neihardt, who was born in 1881, is: English Department, University of Missouri, Columbia, Mo.
