Whereupon a Cincinnati paper chaffed the poet in this fashion: “Certainly, Mr. Longfellow; but if you sung it you told it, didn’t you? It is rather your point to tell a thing in singing it! Why, then, ‘sung or told?’ And why the back in the third line? Break that back. Could one repay you forward? And is not a sign also a salutation?”
Mock Heroics
Out rode from his wild, dark castle
The terrible Heinz von Stein;
He came to the door of a tavern,
And gazed on the swinging sign.
He sat himself down at a table,
And growled for a bottle of wine;
Up came with a flask and a corkscrew
A maiden of beauty divine.