Sonnet 73: That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold
by William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish’ d by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
 

“Sonnet 73: That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold” by William Shakespeare. Public Domain.  (buy now)

It's the birthday of the playwright John Arden (books by this author), born in Barnsley, England (1930-2012) who was bookish and well behaved until he joined the army, where he said, "I heard a lot of stories which I found rather distressing and not what I thought the army was for." He came home and started writing plays that attacked British conformity. He's best known for his play “Serjeant Musgrave's Dance” (1959), about four deserters from the British army who try to persuade the local people in their town that war is pointless. John Arden said, "Theater must celebrate noise, disorder, drunkenness, lasciviousness, nudity, generosity, corruption, fertility, and ease."

It's the birthday of Beryl Markham (books by this author), born Beryl Clutterbuck on this day in 1902 in Leicester, England.

Markham's family had moved to colonial East Africa when she was three. She took her first plane ride, and began a career as a bush pilot, delivering supplies and passengers to remote areas, rescuing miners and hunters from the bush, finding elephants and game for wealthy hunters, and learning to land her plane in whatever forest clearing or field was at hand. After less than a year in the cockpit, Markham undertook a daring solo flight from Africa to England and from there determined she would complete a flight no one else had yet dared — a solo, nonstop transatlantic flight from London west to New York City, flying the entire way against the prevailing winds of the jet stream.

On the evening of September 4, 1936, Markham departed from London in a borrowed single-engine Vega Gull capable of flying up to 163 miles per hour and fitted with enough extra fuel tanks to go almost 4,000 miles without stopping. Two hours later, she was seen passing Ireland, then spied by a ship at sea, and then spotted the following day over the tip of Newfoundland. And then she disappeared.

She had crash-landed nose-first into a peat bog on the edge of Nova Scotia. With her plane now stuck in the mud, she climbed out and hailed a couple of fisherman, calling out, "I'm Mrs. Markham. I've just flown from England."

She returned to England a celebrity and did not take up flying again, but she wrote a memoir called West with the Night (1942).

It was on this day in 1900 that Henry James (books by this author) wrote his first letter to the budding novelist Edith Wharton (books by this author), beginning a long friendship. Wharton was an admirer of James's work, and she sent him one of the first short stories she ever wrote. He wrote back to say that he liked the story but that she shouldn't write about Europe if she didn't live there. His advice inspired her to write about the New York society she'd grown up in, and the result was The House of Mirth (1905), which became her first big success.

They remained friends for the rest of James's life, but while Wharton became more successful, James's novels sold less and less well.

It was on this day in 1825 that the Erie Canal opened. The canal was 363 miles long, linking Buffalo on Lake Erie in western New York to Albany on the Hudson River. The Erie Canal was such an impressive feat of engineering that it was called the Eighth Wonder of the World.

The construction took eight years. The workers were local laborers and Irish immigrants. Their work days could last up to 14 hours, often in miserable conditions, for which they were paid 80 cents a day plus a ration of whiskey. They had the help of oxen, but they did much of the excavating work by hand, from felling trees to using hand drills on rocks. The canal went through swamps, forests, and rocky cliffs; it had a series of aqueducts to cross rivers, and lift locks to compensate for the 675 feet of elevation change. There were no civil engineering schools in America, so the team of engineers made it up as they went along.

Though it had been scorned as a foolish enterprise, the Erie Canal opened up western New York, and much of the Midwest, to settlement and trade. Before the canal, it cost between $90 and $125 to ship a ton of cargo from Buffalo to New York City; after the canal's completion, that same ton cost just $4. Within the first year, 2,000 boats, 9,000 horses, and 8,000 men were working to transport cargo on the canal.

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