Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.

These lines are from Leigh Hunt’s short lyric commonly titled “Jenny Kiss’d Me,” first published in 1838. Hunt (1784–1859), a prominent English essayist, critic, and poet associated with the Romantic circle (including Keats and Shelley), often wrote in a conversational, intimate mode. The poem presents a small domestic moment—an affectionate greeting from “Jenny”—and frames it against the larger, inevitable pressures of time, aging, and worldly disappointment. By addressing “Time” directly as a “thief,” Hunt turns a private recollection into a compact meditation on what endures in memory when other comforts (health, wealth, youth) fade.

The speaker measures life’s losses against a single, vivid gain: the remembered kiss. Calling time a “thief” suggests that years steal pleasures and vitality, yet the poem insists that time also “collects” sweetness—moments that can be preserved as emotional capital. The repeated final clause (“Jenny kissed me”) works like a refrain that overrides the catalogue of misfortunes: weariness, sadness, missed health and wealth, and encroaching age. Hunt’s point is not that suffering is unreal, but that love’s brief, embodied gestures can outweigh it in significance, becoming a triumphant summary of a life otherwise marked by decline.

1) Title and spelling often vary: “Jenny Kiss’d Me” / “Jenny Kissed Me.”
2) Line 4 sometimes appears as: “Sweets into your list, put this in.”
3) Line 6 sometimes appears as: “Say that health and wealth have miss’d me.”