Last Thursday, I left for a Celebration of Life/aka a funeral and in my general stress forgot to post this on Friday. Enjoy it now. Longfellow wrote six sonnets on Dante and Italy, and cathedrals where he thought about Dante. This one (number five) is remarkably Eucharistic. V I Lift mine eyes, and all the [...]
This is not about me! What is regret? I’m trying to figure out the ‘exact’ meaning of regret. If you had feelings of regret and they were somehow expunged, what would you feel instead? Google says it is a “complex and painful emotion” that stems from imagining a different outcome of past action — or [...]
Longfellow wrote this in 1860 as part of a whole suite of poetry for children. The man who put the lanterns in the Old North Church was a change ringer, a particular kind of bell ringer, and the Old North Church bell ringers of the 1980's were still very proud of their contribution. Not just [...]
Here are the last two of Longfellow's six sonnets about Dante. Remember, Longfellow wasn't Catholic, he was a Unitarian. Then read Sonnet V right to its lovely end. Sonnet VI might be pointing to Italian history of the 1800's but I don't know for sure. I do know that there is lots of commentary about [...]
Longfellow was not Catholic. I don't know how he felt about Catholicism but his translation of Dante, and these sonnets, amazing meditations on confession, are evidence of a sympathy at least. He was friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne whose daughter Rose became a Catholic nun. She is currently listed as a Servant of God. He also [...]
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