On Another’s Sorrow
by William Blake

Can I see anothers woe,
And not be in sorrow too.
Can I see anothers grief,
And not seek for kind relief.

Can I see a falling tear
And not feel my sorrows share,
Can a father see his child,
Weep, nor be with sorrow fill'd.

Can a mother sit and hear,
An infant groan an infant fear—
No no never can it be.
Never never can it be.

And can he who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small birds grief & care
Hear the woes that infants bear—

And not sit beside the nest
Pouring pity in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near
Weeping tear on infants tear.

And not sit both night & day,
Wiping all our tears away.
O! no never can it be.
Never never can it be.

He doth give his joy to all.
He becomes an infant small.
He becomes a man of woe
He doth feel the sorrow too.

Think not, thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy maker is not by.
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy maker is not near.

O! he gives to us his joy,
That our grief he may destroy
Till our grief is fled & gone
He doth sit by us and moan.
 

"On Another's Sorrow" by William Blake. Public domain. (buy now)

On this day in 1698, British engineer Thomas Savery patented the first steam engine. He wanted to find a way to pump water out of coal mines, and eventually he built a machine that was filled with water itself. When steam was introduced under pressure, the water level rose and created a vacuum that drew more water up through a valve below. He described it in his book The Miner's Friend (1702) as "a new invention for raising of water and occasioning motion to all sorts of mill work by the impellent force of fire, which will be of great use and advantage for draining mines, serving towns with water, and for the working of all sorts of mills where they have not the benefit of water nor constant winds."

Though Savery's invention worked, his machine was never used in mines due to fears that the boilers would explode. It also wasn't cost-efficient, used large amounts of fuel to run the boiler, and the soldered joints wouldn't tolerate much pressure. Savery coined the term "horsepower" in describing how powerful his steam engine was; because mines had previously been drained using horses and buckets, he claimed his machine had the power of 10 horses.

Today in 1937, Amelia Earhart was last heard from, somewhere over the Pacific. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had set off in May from Miami to fly around the world in a Lockheed Electra. She said, "I have a feeling that there is just about one more good flight left in my system, and I hope this trip is it."

They had completed all but about 7,000 miles of the trip when they landed in New Guinea. Maps of this part of the Pacific were inaccurate, and U.S. Coast Guard ships were in place to help guide them to their next stop, the tiny Howland Island. The weather was cloudy and rainy when they left New Guinea. At 7:42 a.m., Earhart communicated to the Coast Guard Cutter Itasca: "We must be on you, but we cannot see you. Fuel is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet." Her last transmission, about an hour later, was "We are running north and south."

Today is the birthday of the folk singer-songwriter Greg Brown, born in Fairfield, Iowa (1949). His father was a Pentecostal preacher and his mother was an English teacher who played electric guitar. Young Greg learned to sing and play a variety of musical instruments as a kid in southeastern Iowa. "I think I'm part of the last generation of songwriters that are really influenced by where they grew up," he said, "because things these days are becoming more and more homogenized [...] My family comes from an area with lots of rich music [...] hill music that was surrounded by storytelling, so it seemed natural to me."

He got his first professional gig at the age of 18, organizing hootenannies — gatherings of folk singers — in New York City. His songs have been covered by Willie Nelson, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Carlos Santana, among others, and he's recorded two dozen albums himself. In 1986, he released Songs of Innocence and of Experience, William Blake's collection of poems set to music.

It’s the birthday of Wisława Szymborska (books by this author), born in Poland (1923). When she won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1996, few people outside of Poland had ever heard of her. Her first poems were published in the Krakov newspaper, and for almost 20 years she edited a weekly column for the journal Literary Life, for which she also wrote scores of book reviews, as well as translations of French poetry. Her early poems dealt with the horrors of World War II and of the Stalin era. Her later poems are more personal, and her work is celebrated for its candor and gentle humor. When she accepted the Nobel Prize, she said: “They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one’s behind me, anyway.”

It’s the birthday of civil rights activist, lawyer, and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908), born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Marshall’s ruling in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case (1954) was instrumental in ending legal racial segregation. Marshall was the first African-American appointed to the Supreme Court (1967).

On the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, which challenged the doctrine of “separate but equal,” Thurgood Marshall said, “Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time, and in the same place.” On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which changed the landscape of American education forever.

Thurgood Marshall died in 1993. In the aftermath of his death, one obituary read, “We make movies about Malcolm X, we get a holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, but every day we live with the legacy of Justice Thurgood Marshall.”