| When We Two Parted
by Lord Byron When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken—hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this. The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow—
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame. They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o’er me—
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well—
Long, long I shall rue thee,
Too deeply to tell. In secret we met—
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.
“When We Two Parted” by Lord Byron. Public Domain. (buy now)
Today is the birthday of soprano Rosa Ponselle (works by this artist) born in Meriden, Connecticut, in 1897. She was the first American-born and -trained opera star, and she made her debut with the Metropolitan Opera in New York on November 15, 1918, just after the armistice was declared in Europe. Ponselle sang with the Met for 19 seasons and helped open the door to generations of American opera singers.
It’s the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade ruling (1973). The plaintiff was “Jane Roe,” a woman who was forbidden to seek an abortion in Texas, but couldn’t afford to travel to a neighboring state. The defendant, Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade, argued that life begins at conception and therefore the state had a compelling interest in protecting that life. Justice Harry Blackmun, who had once served as counsel to the Mayo Clinic, wrote the decision. He wrote: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” Therefore, the court based its decision on the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments and the right to privacy, and ruled seven to two in favor of Jane Roe. The decision forbade states from outlawing abortions in the first trimester and set limits on regulation of abortion in the second and third trimesters. The court also required that exceptions to any regulations be made when the health of the mother was at stake.
It’s the birthday of Howard Moss (1922) (books by this author). He was born in New York City, and grew up in Rockaway Beach, in the borough of Queens. He’s best remembered as the poetry editor for The New Yorker, where he worked for almost 40 years, but he has a sizable body of his own work as well: poetry, plays, literary criticism, and satire. He received the National Book Award for his Selected Poems in 1971. He joined The New Yorker in 1948, as the fiction editor. Two years later, he convinced Harold Ross, the magazine’s founder, to promote him to poetry editor. He nurtured the careers of many young poets, including Theodore Roethke, W.S. Merwin, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath. He died in 1987.
It’s the birthday of novelist Aryn Kyle (books by this author), born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1978. When she was five years old, she moved to Grand Junction, a desert town in Colorado. She liked horses, took riding lessons, and competed in some horse shows. She went off to college, then to get her M.F.A. at the University of Montana. And while she was in grad school, she wrote a short story called “Foaling Season,” about a girl named Alice who lives on a horse ranch in a town called Desert Valley, Colorado, which Kyle based on Grand Junction. It was published in The Atlantic Monthly, and it went on to win the National Magazine Award for fiction. She turned it into a novel called The God of Animals (2007), with “Foaling Season” as the first chapter. The God of Animals became an award-winning best-seller.
It’s the birthday of poet Lord Byron (books by this author), born George Gordon Noel Byron in London (1788). At the age of 19, he published his first book of poetry, Hours of Idleness (1807). Byron left to spend a couple of years traveling around the Mediterranean, and he began work on a long poem. He sent his agent the first two cantos of the poem he had been working on abroad, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.” The first edition of 500 copies was expensive, but it sold out in three days. Two days later, a second, cheaper edition of 3,000 copies was printed. Byron said, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.” He soon became the darling of London high society, and he embarked on a series of love affairs. One of his lovers summed him up as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” A few months later, he left England and never returned. He died fighting in the Greek War of Independence.
It's the birthday of the man who founded the science of electrodynamics: André-Marie Ampère, born in Lyon, France (1775). Ampère didn't have much in the way of formal schooling, but he was math genius from the time he was young. When he was 13, he wrote and submitted his first mathematical paper. These were the years of the French Revolution, and when Ampère was 17, his father was arrested and guillotined. He eventually married and had a son and took a job teaching mathematics, was widowed, quickly remarried, had a daughter despite the new marriage’s failure. Despite his rocky personal life, Ampère continued to make major contributions to mathematics, chemistry, and physics. He produced work on partial differential equations, discovered the chemical element fluorine, and wrote about the wave theory of light. Ampère died at the age of 61. His is one of 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower, under the first balcony. The ampere — the unit of measurement for electrical current — is named after him. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 
