The Library of Congress receives hundreds of questions each year from people seeking help identifying the full text and authors of poems they read years—if not decades—ago. Most people are able to recall little more than a phrase or line from the sought poem and the general period of their life when they read it (e.g., elementary school or high school), and then hope that our reference librarians can successfully apply their sleuthing skills to the task of tracking down the complete poem.
I and my colleagues in the Library’s new Researcher and Reference Services Division (formerly the Humanities and Social Sciences Division) field the vast majority of “help finding a poem” questions that come in through the Library’s Ask a Librarian service, and we pride ourselves on having quite a good success rate in identifying poems and their sources for patrons. That said, it’s not always possible to pinpoint the exact source of a poem, or to definitively identify a poem’s author.
Such is the case with the poem at the end Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 movie—and recent winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture—The Shape of Water.
During the past month, several moviegoers who have seen The Shape of Water have written us in desperate search of the original source and author of this poem. And they are not the only ones in pursuit of an answer: searching the poem’s text online reveals many websites, online forums, and social media services—from Reddit to Twitter—whose users are actively trying to figure out the poem’s author.
The poem, as I mentioned, appears at the close of The Shape of Water, and is introduced by the movie’s narrator, who says (minor spoiler alert!): “But when I think of her, of Elisa, the only thing that comes to mind is a poem, whispered by someone in love hundreds of years ago.”
