A Barred Owl
by Richard Wilbur

The warping night air having brought the boom
Of an owl's voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
"Who cooks for you?" and then "Who cooks for you?"

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.


"A Barred Owl" by Richard Wilbur, from Collected Poems: 1943-2004. © Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Today is All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween. It’s believed to originate in the Celtic festival of Samhain, a pre-Christian festival held around November 1 to mark the end of summer and the beginning of winter. It was the biggest holiday of the Celtic year: a combination of a harvest festival, New Year’s Eve, and community meeting. Animals were brought in from the pasture and made secure for the coming winter, and some of them were slaughtered to provide salted meat for the winter. It was also a time of year when the veil between living and dead was particularly porous, so the spirits of the dearly departed were more easily able to return to their earthly homes. And it meant that other otherworldly creatures — like fairies, leprechauns, and other tricksters — were more likely to be among us. But even though ghosties and ghoulies wandered among the living during Samhain, the supernatural wasn’t the main focus of the holiday the way it is for Halloween.

As the Christian Church grew, Samhain blended with a Christian holiday known as All Saints’ Day, All Hallows’ Day, or Hallowmas, which was originally observed in May but later moved to November 1. It was a time for believers to honor and remember those who had passed on to heaven. This blending was not coincidental. Early Christian leaders told their missionaries that if they wanted to convert pagans to Christianity, they shouldn’t waste time on trying to suppress their rituals and practices, but rather they should consecrate those practices to Christ and incorporate them wherever possible. This had the effect of establishing Christianity among the pagans — but it also preserved many of the pagan practices instead of quashing them. So Samhain and All Saints’ Day rituals influenced each other and eventually merged, and that is when we begin to see the traditions that we associate with Halloween today.

One such tradition was the practice of “souling,” common in Britain and Ireland in the Middle Ages. Poor people would go door to door on Hallowmas and offer to pray for the souls of the family’s dead relatives, in exchange for an offering of food. It mingled with the practice of “mumming”: dressing up in costumes and performing wacky antics in exchange for food and drink, and eventually trick-or-treating became a traditional part of Halloween.

Today is the 65th birthday of American journalist and writer Susan Orlean (books by this author), born in Cleveland, Ohio (1955), who spent two years writing a book about a group of orchid poachers in South Florida. That book, The Orchid Thief (1998), became an international best-seller and was later made into a film starring Meryl Streep (2002).

Orlean’s first book was Saturday Night (1990), a nonfiction account of how people across America spent their Saturday nights. Her other books include The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People (2001) and Rin Tin Tin: The Life and Legend (2011), about the legendary Hollywood German shepherd. When she was a child, Orlean’s grandfather kept a Rin Tin Tin figurine on his desk and she ached to play with it, and to own a German shepherd of her own. Her latest is The Library Book (2018).

It’s the birthday of the poet John Keats (books by this author), born on this day in Finsbury Pavement, near London, in 1795. His father was a stable keeper, but he died when Keats was eight years old, and when he was a teenager his mother died of tuberculosis, which in those days was called consumption. It’s the disease that would later kill his brother Tom and eventually Keats himself.

Keats hadn’t been much of a reader before his mother’s death, but now he started to read all the time, especially old classics and poetry like Spenser’s Faerie Queene. He spent a few years as an apprentice in a hospital, and even worked as a surgeon, but his heart wasn’t in medicine, so he quit and focused on poetry. He published his first book, Poems, in 1817, but it got bad reviews and didn’t sell well. Then Keats realized he was suffering from TB, so he moved to a friend’s house in the country. And there he lived next door to a beautiful and fashionable young woman named Fanny Brawne, and he fell in love with her. In love, knowing he was sick, in just a few months he wrote most of the poems that he’s famous for, including “To Psyche,” “To a Nightingale,” and “On a Grecian Urn.”

But his tuberculosis was getting worse, and his doctor told him to leave England and go to Italy instead, which he did, and he died in Rome in 1821, just after a crushing review was published about his epic poem Endymion. He asked that his name not be put on his tombstone, only the words “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

He was just 25 years old when he died, and he had published only 54 poems. Endymion, the poem that critics had scorned, opens with what has become a very famous line in English literature: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.”

The Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, sometimes known as “Jan,” was baptized in Delft on this date in 1632. Not much is known about the first 20 years of Vermeer’s life. His father, Reynier, was an art dealer, and he also ran a tavern. Reynier died in 1652, and Jan inherited both of these businesses. The following year, he married Catharina Bolnes. He also registered as a “master painter” with the Guild of Saint Luke.

Not much is known about when, why, or how he became an artist. He began his career by painting large-scale biblical scenes, but he’s beloved for his small, intimate glimpses into the daily life of a 17th-century Dutch household.

France invaded the Dutch Republic in 1672, and the Dutch economy crashed. Vermeer died in 1675, at the age of 43, possibly from heart attack or stroke as a result of the stress of his mounting debts. His widow later wrote: “As a result and owing to the very great burden of his children, having no means of his own, he had lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day or day and a half he had gone from being healthy to being dead.” There was one painting that meant a great deal to Vermeer; he refused to sell it even to pay his creditors, and Catharina went to great lengths to try to keep it in the family after he died. That was The Art of Painting (c. 1668). It depicts an artist at work in his studio, painting a young woman who is posing as Clio, the Muse of History.

Vermeer wasn’t famous during his lifetime. He didn’t produce many paintings to begin with — only about three dozen survive — and most of them were sold to local collectors. Some of his work was credited to other artists, like de Hooch. It wasn’t until 200 years after his death that his reputation spread outside the Netherlands.

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

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