Shortest Day of the Year, With Bird

Shortest day of the year. My mother liked this poem:

I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December
A magical thing
And sweet to remember

You are nearer to spring
Than you were in September
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December

She used it on her Christmas card in about 1957. So far as I know, she had no idea where it came from. Nor did I, but the magic of Google tells me it is the work of a certain Oliver Hereford, otherwise unknown to me, who survives in a few webified one-liners and short versus, as in:

Diplomacy: lying in state.

A woman’s mind is cleaner than a man’s: she changes it more often.

There are more fish taken out of a stream than ever were in it.

The bird verse pops up in kindergarten songbooks. I admit, I have tried to enforce it on the odd infant myself. There’s a poem about a hippopotamus here, but for my money the hippo has inspired better.

Taken together, these fragments suggest a particular time and milieu—somewhere between Sydney Smith and Ogden Nash. On these samples, it is perhaps easy enough to see why he is forgotten. Still, the bird verse is memorable enough that I hope it cuts at least ten minutes off Hereford’s time in purgatory.