Birds of Passage
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Black shadows fall
From the lindens tall,
That lift aloft their massive wall
Against the southern sky;

And from the realms
Of the shadowy elms
A tide-like darkness overwhelms
The fields that round us lie.

But the night is fair,
And everywhere
A warm, soft vapor fills the air,
And distant sounds seem near,

And above, in the light
Of the star-lit night,
Swift birds of passage wing their flight
Through the dewy atmosphere.

I hear the beat
Of their pinions fleet,
As from the land of snow and sleet
They seek a southern lea.

I hear the cry
Of their voices high
Falling dreamily through the sky,
But their forms I cannot see.

Oh, say not so!
Those sounds that flow
In murmurs of delight and woe
Come not from wings of birds.

They are the throngs
Of the poet's songs,
Murmurs of pleasures, and pains, and wrongs,
The sound of winged words.

This is the cry
Of souls, that high
On toiling, beating pinions, fly,
Seeking a warmer clime,

From their distant flight
Through realms of light
It falls into our world of night,
With the murmuring sound of rhyme.


"Birds of Passage" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Public domain. (buy now)

The Erie Canal was completed on this date in 1825. An engineering marvel that was once called the Eighth Wonder of the World, it connects Lake Erie to the Hudson River. Construction on the canal began in 1817; it runs 363 miles from Albany to Buffalo, and traverses rivers, valleys, forests, and marshes. It was the first route from the eastern coastal ports to the Great Lakes that didn't require portage, it was significantly faster than overland routes, and it cut transportation costs by about 90 percent.

It's the birthday of the poet C.K. Williams, (books by this author) born in Newark, New Jersey (1936). His two greatest passions in high school were girls and basketball. He was a good basketball player, 6 feet 5 inches, and he was recruited to play in college. But then he wrote a poem for a girl he was trying to impress, and she was actually impressed, and so he decided he should be a poet instead. He dropped out of college to move to Paris because that's where he thought poets should live. He didn't write at all while he was there, but he did realize that he didn't know anything and should probably go back to college. He said: "It was an incredibly important time. Not much happened and yet my life began then. I discovered the limits of loneliness." He went back and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and started publishing books of poetry, books like Tar (1983), Flesh and Blood (1987), and The Singing (2003), which won the National Book Award.

He wrote: "Poets try to help one another when we can; however, competitive we are, and we are, / the life's so chancy, we feel so beleaguered, we need all the good will we can get. / Whether you're up from a slum or down from a carriage, how be sure you're a poet? / How know if your work has enduring worth, or any? Self-doubt is almost our definition."

It's the birthday of the cowboy comedian Will Rogers, (books by this author) born in Oologah in what is now Oklahoma (1879). In those days, it was called Indian Territory. He himself was part Cherokee and got the nickname "the Cherokee Kid." He grew up on a big ranch, and he learned to rope as a boy. When friends stayed over at his house, they would wake up to the sound of young Will yelling "Catch him! Rope him!" in his dreams.

He tried some school here and there, but he didn't like it, and he dropped out to work on ranches, traveling to Argentina, South Africa, and Australia. He got a job as a roper in the circus, and moved on to vaudeville, where he was a big success. He moved from just doing stunts to incorporating stand-up comedy in his act — commentary on the daily news, one-liners, and riffs on politics and culture, all delivered with an Oklahoma twang. Everyone loved his act, so he started writing a daily newspaper column, "Will Rogers Says," which was read by about 40 million people a day. On top of all that, he acted in more than 70 Hollywood films. He died in a plane crash when he was 55 years old.

He said, "America is becoming so educated that ignorance will be a novelty. I will belong to a select few."

It's the birthday of novelist Charles Frazier, (books by this author) born in Asheville, North Carolina (1950). His family had lived in the same region for hundreds of years — he said, "I am triply qualified for acceptance into the Sons of Confederate Veterans." He tried writing a few stories when he was in his 20s, but they weren't very good and he decided he should go into academia and read other writers instead of trying it himself.

But 20 years later, he got the urge to write again. He knew he wanted to write about the history of western North Carolina, and he started taking notes, doing little bits of research, but he didn't have a plot yet. Then his father told him the story of one of their ancestors, a man named Inman who was wounded in the Confederate Army, and ended up deserting and walking all the way home, across North Carolina, to his small town at the foot of Cold Mountain. As soon as he heard the story, Frazier knew that it would be his book. He said: "I was pretty suspicious of writing a Civil War novel. I didn't want to write a novel of the battles and the generals and those famous personalities. There have been a lot of books written about that — good ones and bad ones — and I didn't want to add to the bulk of that literature. But I realized that there are two kinds of books about a war: there's an Iliad, about fighting the war, and about the battles and generals, and there's an Odyssey, about a warrior who has decided that home and peace are the things he wants. Once I decided that I was writing an Odyssey kind of book instead of an Iliad kind of book, I could move forward with it with some sense of happiness." So Inman became his Odysseus, journeying back to the woman he loves, who has had her own hellish experience through the years of war.

But even after lots of research, Charles Frazier couldn't find much more information about the real Inman, so he fleshed out the details from his own imagination, reading through letters and diaries from the Civil War. He took time off from teaching, and every day when his daughter got home from school she would read aloud what he had written, so he could make sure it sounded like real dialogue. For a while he only showed his manuscript to his wife and daughter, but finally his wife passed it on to the best-selling novelist Kaye Gibbons, whom they knew through a carpool group for their kids. Gibbons said: "I have never told anyone to quit their day job and write, but I told him he needed to jump off that cliff. I made a promise to him, that if he worked on that book and continued, that he would make more from this book that he would in five years of teaching. I had such faith in it."

And she was right. In 1997, he published Cold Mountain, and the first print run of 25,000 copies sold out within a week, and it spent months on The New York Times best-seller list. In 2006, he published Thirteen Moons, also set in the western mountains of North Carolina.

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

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