The Bridge
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I stood on the bridge at midnight,
      As the clocks were striking the hour,
And the moon rose o’er the city,
      Behind the dark church-tower.
 
I saw her bright reflection
      In the waters under me,
Like a golden goblet falling
      And sinking into the sea.
 
And far in the hazy distance
      Of that lovely night in June,
The blaze of the flaming furnace
      Gleamed redder than the moon.
 
Among the long, black rafters
      The wavering shadows lay,
And the current that came from the ocean
      Seemed to lift and bear them away;
 
As, sweeping and eddying through them,
      Rose the belated tide,
And, streaming into the moonlight,
      The seaweed floated wide.
 
And like those waters rushing
      Among the wooden piers,
A flood of thoughts came o’er me
      That filled my eyes with tears.
 
How often, O, how often,
      In the days that had gone by,
I had stood on that bridge at midnight
      And gazed on that wave and sky!
 
How often, O, how often,
      I had wished that the ebbing tide
Would bear me away on its bosom
      O’er the ocean wild and wide!
 
For my heart was hot and restless,
      And my life was full of care,
And the burden laid upon me
      Seemed greater than I could bear.
 
But now it has fallen from me,
      It is buried in the sea;
And only the sorrow of others
      Throws its shadow over me.
 
Yet whenever I cross the river
      On its bridge with wooden piers,
Like the odor of brine from the ocean
      Comes the thought of other years.
 
And I think how many thousands
      Of care-encumbered men,
Each bearing his burden of sorrow,
      Have crossed the bridge since then.
 
I see the long procession
      Still passing to and fro,
The young heart hot and restless,
      And the old subdued and slow!
 
And forever and forever,
      As long as the river flows,
As long as the heart has passions,
      As long as life has woes;
 
The moon and its broken reflection
      And its shadows shall appear,
As the symbol of love in heaven,
      And its wavering image here.


“The Bridge” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Public Domain.  (buy now)

It was on this day in 1919 that Congress overrode President Woodrow Wilson's veto and passed the Volstead Act, which provided for enforcement of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the sale of alcohol. The prohibition movement had been led largely by women, who still had a hard time making a living on their own, and many had seen their lives ruined when their husbands squandered the family income on alcohol.

It's commonly believed that prohibition didn't really stop anyone from drinking and merely gave a boost to organized crime. That was true in big cities because they refused to enforce the law, but in rural America, prohibition was extremely effective. Both cirrhosis death rates and admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholism fell by more than fifty percent, and arrests for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct went way down. But city newspapers focused on how easy it was to find alcohol. Even members of the United States Congress had a private country club where they drank liquor openly.

It's the birthday of Evelyn Waugh (books by this author), born in London, England in 1903. His family was affluent, and he was upset when he found out that he couldn't attend the same prestigious school as his father and brother. He wasn't allowed in because his brother, Alec Waugh, had a homosexual relationship, was dismissed from the school, and then wrote a book about it. So Evelyn went to a less prestigious school, where he thought all his classmates were unsophisticated. Then he went to Hertford, one of the Oxford Colleges, where he did art and wrote and drank, and neglected his academics. When someone asked him if he'd done any sports at college, he replied, "I drank for Hertford." He left Oxford without a degree. He tried teaching and he hated it, he was in debt, so he attempted suicide by drowning himself in the ocean, but he got stung by a jellyfish so he ran back out. He decided to give his life another chance, and he wrote his first novel, Decline and Fall (1928). It's about an innocent schoolteacher named Paul Pennyfeather who is expelled from Oxford for running across campus without his trousers and has no choice but to become a schoolteacher. He's surrounded by bigots, drunks, and pedophiles, and he almost marries the mother of one of his students, but it turns out she makes her money trafficking in brothels in South America. Evelyn Waugh went on to write many novels, including Brideshead Revisited (1945).

It's the birthday of Dr. Jonas Salk, born in New York City (1914), who developed a polio vaccine at the height of a polio epidemic in the mid-1950s when parents were so worried about their children that they kept them home from swimming pools in the summer. Salk's discovery was that a vaccine could be developed from a dead virus, and he tested the vaccine on himself, his family, and the staff of his laboratory to prove it was safe. The vaccine was finally released to the public in 1955, the number of people infected by polio went down from more than 10,000 a year to less than 100. Salk was declared a national hero.

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

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