Oh! don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?
Sweet Alice, whose hair was so brown.

These lines open Thomas Dunn English’s sentimental ballad “Ben Bolt,” a poem that became widely popular in the mid-19th century and was frequently recited and set to music. English (an American physician, journalist, and poet) wrote in a mode that prized nostalgia and domestic memory, and “Ben Bolt” trades on recollection of youthful love and a vanished rural world. The speaker addresses “Ben Bolt” as an old acquaintance, summoning “sweet Alice” as the emblem of an irrecoverable past. The poem’s fame was amplified by musical adaptations and by its circulation in newspapers and songsters, making it one of English’s best-known works.

The exclamation and direct address (“Oh! don’t you remember…”) immediately frame the poem as an act of shared remembrance, where personal history is preserved through affectionate naming and sensory detail (“hair was so brown”). “Sweet Alice” functions less as a fully developed character than as a figure for idealized youth—innocence, first love, and the warmth of a community now altered by time. The simplicity of diction and the lullaby-like cadence help produce a bittersweet effect: the speaker’s tenderness is inseparable from loss. The lines exemplify 19th-century literary nostalgia, where memory becomes both consolation and wound.