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Near the end of William S. Plumer’s classic 1869 work Earnest Hours, the reader will take note of a poem titled “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh.” Plumer indicates that he does not know who wrote it but commends its “sweet spirit” to all. The first stanza runs thus:
Behold, a royal bridegroom
Hath called me for his bride!
I joyfully make ready and hasten to his side.
He is a royal bridegroom,
But I am very poor!
Of low estate he chose me
To show his love the more;
For he hath purchased for me
Such goodly rich array —
Oh! surely never Bridegroom
Gave gifts like these away.
The poem does indeed have a “sweet spirit” and the composition became a popular hymn. It was often published in the second half of the nineteenth century and has been republished even to the present day. [This poem was brought to the present writer’s remembrance while reading the 2021 reprint of Thomas Houston’s The Adoption of Sons, which includes the poem as an appendix, ascribing it, as Plumer did, to “the pen of an unknown author.”]
In many places, the author’s name is left out altogether or one might see it ascribed to “anonymous” or “unidentified.” But there are some 19th century publications (journals and books) which ascribe it to “A.S.” or “Anna Shipley” or “Mrs. S.R. Shipley.” And, although information about the author is sparse, we are able to confirm that the poet who composed “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh” is indeed one Anna Shinn Shipley (1826-1828), who was the first wife of noted Philadelphia businessman Samuel Richards Shipley (1828-1908). The Shipleys were Quakers, and Anna’s famous poem did appear in an 1861 issue of Friends’ Review, a Quaker periodical, although the first appearance that this writer has located of the poem was ten years earlier in an 1851 book of Religious Poems published in Philadelphia which ascribes authorship of the poem to “unidentified.” Anna would have been around 25 years old at that time, and it was in 1851 that the Shipleys were married, which gives some added significance to the focus on the “bridegroom.”
Not everyone goes to bed at night wondering about the identity of an “anonymous” writer of a particular poem or hymn, but if you are among those who do, we hope that this research will provide some measure of solace, and perhaps also some encouragement to read (or re-read) Plumer’s Earnest Hours and Mrs. Shipley’s poetic contribution thereto.
