The Bridegroom Weeps! Autograph Poem, 1 page [Buenos Aires, 1910-1911]

Unpublished poem by Eugene O'Neill.  Earliest existing O'Neill manuscript.

Provenance:  Agnes Boulton O'Neill; Margery "Budgie" Boulton Colman (sister of Agnes Boulton); Dallas Cline (daughter of Margery Boulton Colman).

The Bridegroom Weeps!

There are so many tears in my eyes --
     Burning, unshed --
There are so many ashes in my mouth --
     Ashes of orchids --
There are so many corpses in my [mind --]
     Of decomposing dreams.

And now, alas!
Columbine, also
Decomposes!

According to the note by Agnes Boulton at the bottom of the manuscript, the poem was written in West Point Pleasant (1918-1919).  However, noted O'Neill biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb (O'Neill, 1962; O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo, 2000) feel certain the poem was written while O'Neill was in Buenos Aires, either late in 1910 or early in 1911.

In the spring of 1909, O'Neill met Kathleen Jenkins.  On October 2, 1909, O'Neill, ushered two-month pregnant Kathleen to New Jersey, where the two were secretly married.  A week later, O'Neill set sail for Honduras on a gold mining expedition, hastily arranged by his father to extricate his son from expectant fatherhood.

O'Neill returned to New York in early March of 1910.  O'Neill was filled with guilt over the damage he had inflicted on Kathleen, as well as on his parents, who were violently opposed to the marriage.

Ella [O'Neill's mother] later told her young friend, Sadie Konig, that Eugene had wept when they talked of his situation. (Life with Monte Cristo, 264)

On May 4, 1910, Eugene O'Neill Jr. was born.  Submissive to his father's wishes, O'Neill again left the country, setting sail for Buenos Aires on June 6, where he arrived on August 4.  He stayed in Buenos Aires until March 21, 1911, returning to New York on April 15.

Optimistic at first about earning a living in Buenos Aires, O'Neill soon sunk to a depth that affected his physical and mental health.  In an interview he remembered, "I was then twenty-two years old and a real-down-and-outer – sleeping on park benches, hanging around waterfront dives, and absolutely alone." (Life with Monte Cristo, 286)

However debilitated he became, Eugene found the will to continue writing poetry, as he acknowledged to a young English reporter he met in a seaman's saloon.  Charles Ashleigh, who free-lanced for the Buenos Aires Herald, remembered Eugene as "rather morose," except when lauding Conrad and Keats.  Ashleigh, too, wrote poetry, and he recalled how they each produced manuscripts from their pockets, "exchanged them across the sloppy table, read, discussed, criticized." (Life with Monte Cristo, 287-288)

In their 1962 biography, the Gelbs refer briefly to one of the poems written by O'Neill in Buenos Aires.

He wrote at least one poem during that period; it was called "Ashes of Orchids." (O'Neill, 156)

The Gelbs elaborate on this in their updated 2000 volume.  In 1958, Arthur Gelb interviewed Robert Carlton Brown, who in 1916 had been a contributing editor to The Masses and a well-paid fiction writer for popular magazines.  Brown often drank with O'Neill at the Hell Hole.

They sometimes talked literature and poetry, and O'Neill once showed Brown a poem entitled "Ashes of Orchids," written, he said, in Buenos Aires. (Life with Monte Cristo, 526)

The Gelbs believe "The Bridegroom Weeps!" was the poem that O'Neill showed Brown at the Hell Hole – Brown remembering the phrase "ashes of orchids," some forty years later, as the title of the poem.  They believe that O'Neill wrote the poem in the depths of his depression and guilt over having left Kathleen and his newborn son.  The Gelbs feel it highly unlikely that O'Neill would have used the phrase "ashes of orchids" in a poem written in Buenos Aires, and then repeat the phrase in another poem written in West Point Pleasant.  The tone and subject matter of the poem would also have been inappropriate at the later date in West Point Pleasant, when O'Neill was happily married to Agnes Boulton.

If "The Bridegroom Weeps!" was indeed written by O'Neill in Buenos Aires, either late in 1910 or early in 1911, it would appear to represent the earliest existing O'Neill manuscript.  O'Neill's earliest published poem "Free" appeared in the Pleiades Club Year Book in 1912.  O'Neill wrote this poem at sea on his way to Buenos Aires in 1910 (Life with Monte Cristo, 273, 336) and gave the autograph manuscript of the poem to Maibelle Scott in 1912. (Life with Monte Cristo, 359)  However, while Yale has a typed copy of the poem made by Carlotta Monterey O'Neill in 1940 (Gallup, Eugene O'Neill Poems: 1912-1944, 1), the whereabouts of the original manuscript is unknown.