The Arrow and the Song

(Untitled fabric-work by Louise Bourgeois, 1911-2010,
French-born American sculptor and artist, known as
The Spider Woman for her large spider structures and
web-like images)

Any study of friendship must include Charlotte’s Web, the classic tale of the life-and-death drama that unfolds in a barn on the Arable farm. The struggle to rescue Wilbur the Pig involves humans like Fern, the farmer’s little daughter, who wants “to rid the world of injustice.” She is joined by animals like Templeton the rat, who is often out only for himself, and other assorted residents of the farmyard, including the sheep and the geese. The heroine is Charlotte A. Cavatica, a spider who goes into battle with only her wit and a finely woven web.

The book ends with three sentences that form one of the finest tributes bestowed on a friend.

“Mr. Zuckerman took fine care of Wilbur all the rest of his days, and the pig was often visited by friends and admirers, for nobody ever forgot the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web. Life in the barn was very good — night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days. It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.

“Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart.

“She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”

~ E. B. White (1899-1985), American novelist and writer, and co-author, with William Strunk, Jr., of the best guide to writing good prose, The Elements of Style

THE ARROW AND THE SONG

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), American poet

The Fourth Wise Man

(Travels of the Three Kings by Salvador Dali, 1904-1989,
Spanish Surrealist painter)

“Three Kings came riding from far away, / Melchior and Gaspar and Baltasar.” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

THE FOURTH WISE MAN

The fourth wise man
disliked travel. If
you walk, there’s the
gravel. If you ride,
there’s the camel’s attitude.
He far preferred
to be inside in solitude
to contemplate the star
that had been getting
so much larger
and more prolate* lately —
stretching vertically
(like the souls of martyrs)
toward the poles
(or like the yawns of babies).

~ Kay Ryan, born 1945, American poet

* prolate - in geometry: having a polar diameter which is longer than the equatorial diameter

The Sound of the Sea

(Approaching Thunderstorm near Bristol, Narragansett
Bay, R.I., 1859 by Martin Johnson Heade, 1819-1904,
American painter)

“Until I saw the sea / I did not know / a sea breathes in and out / upon a shore,” wrote the poet Lillian Moore (1909-2004).

THE SOUND OF THE SEA

The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,
And round the pebbly beaches far and wide
I heard the first wave of the rising tide
Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;
A voice out of the silence of the deep,
A sound mysteriously multiplied
As of a cataract from the mountain's side,
Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.
So comes to us at times, from the unknown
And inaccessible solitudes of being,
The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul:
And inspirations that we deem our own,
Are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeing
Of things beyond our reason or control.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), American poet

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport

(interior of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island)

In August, 1790, President George Washington visited the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. He later wrote to Moses Seixas, the warden of its congregation, reaffirming the religious freedom that made it possible for the members to practice their faith:

“The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.... May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

He wrote these words more than a year before Congress ratified the Bill of Rights in 1791, with its first amendment to the constitution that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

The first Jews had arrived in Rhode Island in 1658, fleeing religious persecution in Europe. Many had Spanish and Portuguese roots. Here they found a colony with a tradition of religious tolerance. They met in private homes until they dedicated their first house of worship in 1763. This synagogue is now the oldest surviving one in North America.

Longfellow wrote this poem the summer of 1852, after he walked among the gravestones of the Touro cemetery.

from THE JEWISH CEMETERY AT NEWPORT

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!

The trees are white with dust, that o’er their sleep
Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind’s breath,
While underneath such leafy tents they keep
The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.

And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,
That pave with level flags their burial-place,
Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down
And broken by Moses at the mountain’s base.

The very names recorded here are strange,
Of foreign accent, and of different climes;
Alvares and Rivera interchange
With Abraham and Jacob of old times.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), American poet

The Midnight Ride of Raul Revere

(The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Grant Wood,
1891-1942, American artist)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) wrote a series of narrative poems that helped form the mythology of America: “The Song of Hiawatha,” “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” and “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.”

Paul Revere (1734-1818) was a Boston silversmith. His revolutionary fervor was clearly evident before the War of Independence. He took part in the Boston Tea Party of 1770 protesting the British tax on tea. He made the provocative engraving of the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770, in which British soldiers shot and killed five civilians. He was also part of a network that gathered information on the movements of the British soldiers.

He did not become famous until many years after his death, with the 1863 publication of Longfellow’s stirring poem of his midnight ride. It is one of the twenty-two “Tales of a Wayside Inn.” (Located in Sudbury, Massachusetts, the inn is still open for service.)

Because of this poem, many people have the mistaken notion that Revere was the only rider that night. At least forty other men also set out on the roads and byways to warn the people that “The Regulars are out!” That’s how they referred to the British soldiers — after all, they were still British themselves. Revere never made it to Concord. Before he could get there, he was arrested and brought back to Lexington, where he was released without his horse.

from THE LANDLORD’S TALE:
THE MIDNIGHT RIDE OF PAUL REVERE

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower, as a signal light, —
One, if by land, and two, if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.”

. . . .

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet:
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.

He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock,
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer's dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadows brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.

. . . .

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm, —
A cry of defiance and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beat of that steed,
And the midnight-message of Paul Revere.