Search to Divine Authorship Leads 'Footprints' to Court

Last fall, in an online article for the Poetry Foundation, a Brooklyn journalist and literary sleuth named Rachel Aviv traced elements of "Footprints" to a sermon delivered in 1880, and raised the tantalizing possibility that nobody really wrote "Footprints in the Sand." Those who have claimed to, Aviv noted, may be suffering from the collective "accidental plagiarism" that Carl Jung explored in his paper "Cryptomnesia" more than a century ago.

Everyone knows a cryptomnesiast, of one sort or another. It's your cousin who stood up at Peepaw's funeral and tried to pass off the "Do not cry, I did not die" poem as his own; or those crafty tykes who keep submitting bits of Shel Silverstein as original verse to The Post's kids' poetry contest. It's the woman who sends you a sympathy card after your dog dies, with her handwritten version of the (also disputed) fable about dogs waiting for their masters in Heaven. It's your church pastor or corporate motivational speaker who keeps coming up with those amazing "I-recently-met-a-man-who" anecdotes to illustrate his point.

Something can be so profound, so true, (so "duh") that the cryptomnesiast is sure she thought it up herself. There is very little you can buy at a crafts fair or in the self-help section at Barnes & Noble that doesn't have a whiff of the unattributed.

So why go after the origin of "Footprints" now, after all these years? Why a lawsuit?

"Because someone is trying to take credit for it," Bartel said, for the plaintiff.

" 'Why now?' is my question, too," said Hughes, but he's confident a judge will dismiss the suit, if for no other reason than the tide came in long ago. "Mary Stevenson and her family have had 20 years to bring this suit."

And a lot has happened since "Footprints" caught on. It started out as a tranquil walk in the soft-focus mists, but, jeez, you turn around and it's Coney Island out there.

Staff researcher Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.