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Contract with Mrs. T. K. Beecher

The present text is based upon three stone fragments Mark Twain inscribed for Mrs. Beecher in 1895, the only phase known to have been under his control. He had just begun his world lecture tour of 1895–1896, and was somewhere between Crookston, Minnesota, and Butte, Montana, when the poem appeared in the New York Tribune for 31 July 1895. Rev. Beecher or Mrs. Beecher was probably responsible for this publication, and no known subsequent printing suggests Mark Twain's return to the text. For accounts of composition see the New York Tribune, 31 July 1895, p. 6; MTB, p. 1001; and Parade, 18 November 1962, p. 17. The “manuscript” is an ovoid stone split lengthwise into three pieces, the center piece containing stanza III on one side and the title and date (Elmira, 2 July 1895) on the other. The fragments remained in the Beecher home near Quarry Farm for many years and were finally donated to Elmira College in September 1962. The present text supplies periods after “face” (79.5) and “message” (79.12). The pronoun “his” His (79.6) referring to God has been capitalized.

Earliest known printing: New York Tribune, 31 July 1895, p. 6; text derivative of the Tribune: Munsey's Magazine 14, no. 1 (October 1895): 117; text revised probably by Paine: MTB, p. 1002; text set from the stone fragments: Parade, 18 November 1962, p. 17.

[begin page 79]
11 Contract with Mrs. T. K. BeecherⒺexplanatory note

[1895]


I

If you prove right and I prove wrong
A million years from now,
In language plain and frank and strong
My error I'll avow
To your dear mocking face.

II

If I prove right, by God His grace,
Full sorry I shall be,
For in that solitude no trace
There'll be of you and meⒺexplanatory note,
Nor of our vanished race.

III

A million years, O patient stone,
You've waited for this message.
Deliver it a million hence!
[Survivor pays expressage.]

Mark Twain

Explanatory Notes 11 Contract with Mrs. T. K. Beecher
Ⓔ title] Julia Jones Beecher (1826–1905), wife of Thomas Kinnicut Beecher (see note to 42.2 above). For circumstances of composition see the New York Tribune, 31 July 1895, p. 6; MTB, p. 1001; and Parade, 18 November 1962, p. 17. The Tribune said that Mark Twain wrote the poem at Mrs. Beecher's humorous suggestion; Paine implied that it was Mark Twain's idea; Parade did not argue either way. The Tribune account is suspect, though very close to the date of composition, for it also said that Mark Twain took the doubting side “playfully.” Since the Tribune probably got the story from one of the Beechers, the implication is that he or she was protecting Mark Twain's reputation by denying the sincerity of his skepticism. From the same motive may have come the claim that Mrs. Beecher suggested the poem.
Ⓔ no trace . . . of you and me] An echo of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 33:

. . . Some little talk awhile of ME and THEE

There was—and then no more of THEE and ME.

Mark Twain once called the Rubaiyat “the only poem I have ever carried about with me” (MTB, p. 1295), and A1911, pp. 55–56, lists three copies acquired from the Hartford period until 1907, each with marginal notations. But the influence on Mark Twain's poem was only verbal, and his opinions determined his admiration for Omar, not the reverse. Characteristically, he burlesqued the Rubaiyat four years later in “My Boyhood Dreams.”