Curfew
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I.
Solemnly, mournfully,
Dealing its dole,
The Curfew Bell
Is beginning to toll.
Cover the embers,
And put out the light;
Toil comes with the morning,
And rest with the night.
Dark grow the windows,
And quenched is the fire;
Sound fades into silence,
All footsteps retire.
No voice in the chambers,
No sound in the hall!
Sleep and oblivion
Reign over all!

II.
The book is completed,
And closed, like the day;
And the hand that has written it
Lays it away.
Dim grow its fancies;
Forgotten they lie;
Like coals in the ashes,
They darken and die.
Song sinks into silence,
The story is told,
The windows are darkened,
The hearth-stone is cold.
Darker and darker
The black shadows fall;
Sleep and oblivion
Reign over all.


“Curfew” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Public Domain.  (buy now)

Today is the birthday of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (books by this author), born in Portland, Maine (1807). He entered Bowdoin College at the age of 15, and one of his classmates was Nathaniel Hawthorne; the two would remain lifelong friends. When Longfellow graduated, the college gave him a chair in modern languages, and he worked with translations for the rest of his life.

In 1831 he married Mary Potter, and they went on an extended tour of Europe. While they were in the Netherlands, Mary died from complications after a miscarriage. Longfellow was bereft and found solace in reading German poetry, and when he returned to America to teach at Harvard, he began writing poetry of his own. He wrote about uniquely American subjects, and he was the first American poet to be taken seriously abroad. His collection Ballads and Other Poems (1841) became wildly popular; it included his poems "The Wreck of the Hesperus" and "The Village Blacksmith." He wrote several popular narrative poems, including the book-length Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858). He also undertook the first American translation of Dante's Inferno (1867). He began the project to console himself after his second wife, Fanny, died when her dress caught fire in 1861.

It's the birthday of John Steinbeck, (books by this author) born in Salinas, California (1902). He is the author of the epic novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and also Of Mice and Men (1937).

It's the birthday of the writer who said, "Truth disappears with the telling of it": Lawrence Durrell, (books by this author) born to a British father and Irish mother in Jullundur, India (1911).

The Alexandria Quartet, Durrell's best-known work, is a set of four experimental books, each of which covers the same set of events but from a different narrative viewpoint. Durrell explained that he hoped to write a book about love and memory and space that would blend Einstein's theory of relativity with ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and Indian mysticism and Chinese philosophy. He said the story "is a four-dimensional dance, a relativity poem." Rather than being structured by chronology, the story is structured by memory and geography.

The four books are Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960). The first novel is narrated by a young Englishman, a struggling writer and schoolteacher who recounts his love affair with a rich and beautiful married Jewish woman in Alexandria whom everyone else also seemed to be in love with. In it, he narrates, "A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants." And, "A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying."

When Durrell was eleven, his parents sent him off to England to boarding school so he could get a proper British education. He hated living in England and said, "English life is really like an autopsy. It is so, so dreary." Cambridge rejected him, and he left the country and spent most of the rest of his life abroad.

In the span of 15 years, he lived in Paris; Kalamata, Greece; Cairo; Alexandria; Cordoba, Argentina; Belgrade, Yugoslavia; and Cyprus. Briefly he was a special correspondent for The Economist magazine. He eventually returned to France and settled there.

Before he could make a living solely from his writing, he sold real estate, played jazz piano in nightclubs, raced fast cars, ran a photography studio, worked as a teacher, edited various publications, worked for the British Information Office, worked in public relations and as a press attaché for the British government.

It was in Paris in the late 1930s that Lawrence Durrell met Henry Miller. He'd read Henry Miller's Book Tropic of Cancer, been totally impressed, and written Miller a fan letter. The two men met up, became fast friends, and started editing a literary magazine together. They would exchange letters for the next five decades. Durrell's early books were very much imitations of Miller's writing.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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