The song and the arrow

Born in Portland, Maine, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow displayed an interest in linguistics at an early age, eventually teaching modern languages at Harvard. His idealistic poetry struck a chord with a young country sharply divided over slavery. Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret To the others, it was like, I suppose, something else. Not that it—speech—lay thick on the In the town of frijoles, boys beat on hollow pots, the last wiping of their sides with a piece of tortilla as holy a moment The heart, the surgeon says, does not reveal the small rifts, the hairline cracks which split the hairline cracks they conceal cops and robbers in a stretch of skin flaunting star-scars with show of blood bone the ledges of what it holds tight in checkmate moves