Fairies guard the Queen of May,
Let her reign in Peace and Honor —
Every blessing be upon her;
May her future pathway lie,
All beneath a smiling sky
Note on this work from The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore: This charming fragment is all that has reached us of a poem Poe composed about April 1836 for a schoolgirl in Richmond. She was Harriet Virginia Scott, who lived on Main Street, near the office of the Southern Literary Messenger. Her school was to have a May Day celebration, and she went in company with her cousin, a lawyer and friend of Poe, to ask him to compose a poem for her to recite to the Queen of the May. He complied by writing four or five stanzas. As a nonagenarian Mrs. Thomson of Austin, Texas, she remembered one of them and sent it to J. H. Whitty, sometime in the second decade of the present century. She thought that the stanzas might have been published in some periodical without Poe’s name about 1836, but they have not been discovered. There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of these graceful lines.
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