Perfect Woman
by William Wordsworth

She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleam'd upon my sight;
A lovely apparition, sent
To be a moment's ornament;
Her eyes as star of twilight fair;
Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful dawn;
A dancing shape, an image gay,
To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

I saw her upon nearer view,
A Spirit, yet a Woman too!
Her household motions light and free,
And steps of virgin liberty;
A countenance in which did meet
Sweet records, promises as sweet;
A creature not too bright or good
For human nature's daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.

And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A being breathing thoughtful breath,
A traveller between life and death;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
A perfect Woman, nobly plann'd
To warm, to comfort, and command;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light.


"Perfect Woman" by William Wordsworth. Public domain. (buy now)

Rome was sacked by the Visigoths on this date in the year 410. It was the first time in 800 years that Rome was successfully invaded and marked the beginning of the end of the Western Roman Empire.

Alaric, a chieftain in his mid-30s, was the leader of the Visigoths. They came from what is now Germany and were one of the many tribes who were suffering at the hands of the Roman Empire. Roman leaders enforced higher and higher taxes on the people in their outer provinces and corrupt local officials grew wealthy while the people stayed poor. Rebellions broke out and the Visigoths started moving toward Rome.

The Visigoths began their siege of Rome in 408 and soon residents were starving. Alaric wanted land on which he and his people could settle. He also wanted a position of respect within the empire. He ended his first siege when the Roman Senate paid him off. But after his chief demands were repeatedly rebuffed, he returned to his siege on Rome, this time waging an all-out attack. Rebellious Roman slaves — many of whom had been captured from Germanic tribes — opened the gates to Alaric in the middle of the night. The Visigoths burned, looted, raped, and pillaged, but they treated Christian sites and relics with respect.

St. Jerome, one of the great Church leaders of the day, was living in Bethlehem when Rome fell. He wrote, “In one city, the whole world perished.” At its height the Roman Empire had stretched from Britain and the Atlantic to North Africa and Mesopotamia.

It was on this day in 1456 that the first edition of the Gutenberg Bible was bound and completed in Mainz, Germany. The Gutenberg Bible was the first complete book printed with movable type. The press produced 180 copies of the Bible. Books had been printed on presses before, in China and Korea, with wood and bronze type; but Gutenberg used metal type and made a press that could print many versions of the same text quickly. His contributions to printing were huge: he created an oil-based printing ink, he figured out how to cast individual pieces of type in metal so that they could be reused, and he designed a functioning printing press. But others before him had come up with similar ideas. Probably the most important thing that Gutenberg did was to develop the entire process of printing — he streamlined a system for assembling the type into a full book and then folding the pages into folios, which were then bound into an entire volume — and to do it all quickly. The techniques that Gutenberg refined were used for hundreds of years and the publication of the Gutenberg Bible marked a turning point in the availability of knowledge to regular people.

Today is the birthday of Argentine poet, short-story writer, and essayist Jorge Luis Borges (books by this author), born in Buenos Aires (1899), whose dreamlike, labyrinthian prose gave rise to the term “magical realism.”

Borges grew up comfortably, but not wealthily. His family was rich in literature, though, and he had access to over 1,000 books in his family’s large library. He began reading Shakespeare at 12 and always knew he would be a writer. At nine he translated Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince into Spanish. It was published in a newspaper and was so good that many people thought his father must have done it, not Borges.

Borges’s family moved to Switzerland when he was 15, traveling widely throughout Europe. He began writing poems in the fashion of Walt Whitman and reading the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which would influence his later writing.

His family returned to Buenos Aires and Borges published his first collection of poetry, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). He got a job in a municipal library with a very small collection which allowed him to finish his daily cataloguing duties quickly. He spent the rest of the day in the basement, writing. His first collection of short stories, A Universal History of Infamy (1935), which is a fictionalized account of real-life criminals, is considered to be the beginning of magical realism and Borges’s true style. After Borges suffered a serious head wound (1938), he wrote his most famous works, creating his own worlds, languages, and symbols. His second collection of short stories, El jardín desenderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of the Forking Paths, 1941), is a combination of book and maze, featuring stories about a library containing every possible 410-page text and a man who forgets nothing. He even wrote strange detective stories with a friend under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq. They were published as Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi (1941). When dictator Juan Domingo Perón came to power in 1946 Borges was fired from the library for his support of the Allies during World War II. Perón made him head inspector of rabbit and poultry to punish him. Borges resigned the post.

Borges was famous in Argentina but didn’t become famous in America until after his books began to be translated in 1961. He traveled and lectured frequently but he also began to go blind, which he called “a slow, summer twilight.” He never learned to read Braille and his mother — who lived into her 90s — became his secretary. He dictated his stories to her and, gradually, began writing only poetry. He said, “Blindness made me take up the writing of poetry again. Since rough drafts were denied me, I had to fall back on memory.” Jorge Luis Borges died in 1986. His books include Ficciones (1944), The Aleph (1949), Book of Imaginary Beings (1967), and The Book of Sand (1975).

It’s the birthday of the writer Oscar Hijuelos (books by this author), born in New York City in 1951. His parents were immigrants from Cuba and his father supported the family by working in a hotel. Hijuelos went through the New York public schools, he went to City University, and then he got a job working in an advertising office. At night he would write fiction and he began to publish short stories, and slowly, story by story, he started to win grants and fellowships that gave him more time to write. He published the novel Our House in the Last World (1983), and then seven more novels, including The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), and all of them are stories of Cuban-American life. Mambo Kings won the Pulitzer Prize, which made Hijuelos the first Latino novelist to receive that honor. His novel Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise (2015) was published posthumously.

It’s the baptismal day of poet Robert Herrick (books by this author), born in London (1591). He’s the author of the lines, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, / Old Time is still a-flying, / And this same flower that smiles to-day / To-morrow will be dying.” They appear in his poem “To the Virgins, to make much of Time.” He worked as a goldsmith, went to college, and left London for the English countryside, where he stayed for many years and wrote most of his poetry. He wrote short lyric poems and songs. He wrote about seducing women and taking advantage of your youth, but he never married and most of the women in his poems were probably imaginary. He also wrote religious poems. His poetry was distributed among friends and eventually reached people in higher places, making Herrick known throughout England. In 1648 he published Hesperides, which contained more than 1,000 poems.

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

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