For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!”

These lines come from John Greenleaf Whittier’s long narrative poem “Maud Muller” (1856), first published in the collection *The Tent on the Beach*. The poem tells of a young farm girl, Maud Muller, who briefly encounters a judge riding past her field. Each is struck by the other, yet social convention and hesitation prevent any further connection. Whittier then imagines the separate lives they go on to live—comfortable but emotionally diminished for the judge, and hard and narrowing for Maud—before delivering the famous moral about regret and missed possibilities.

Whittier’s couplet crystallizes a central theme of “Maud Muller”: the pain of unrealized possibility. “It might have been” names a particular kind of sorrow—regret not for what happened, but for what never came to pass because of timidity, class barriers, or the inertia of ordinary life. By contrasting “tongue or pen,” Whittier suggests that neither speech nor writing can surpass the ache of counterfactual longing. The line has endured because it generalizes beyond the poem’s romance: it speaks to any moment when a choice is deferred until it is no longer available, leaving only imagination to supply the lost alternative.

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”

Ah, well! for us all some sweet hope lies
Deeply buried from human eyes;
And, in the hereafter, angels may
Roll the stone from its grave away!