Poetic Tides Through Time

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 a 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]

From: The Home Book of Verse by Burton Egbert Stevenson, 1917, pg. 2923

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         Another childhood favorite of mine from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I once had this memorized as well. He was such a prolific poet from Maine who also had personal tragedy befall him. But his poems are wonderfully measured and creatively rhymed, easy to recall and sometimes, as this one, full of moral and whimsy!

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/henry-wadsworth-longfellow

         This reminded me of the summer we visited my brother-in-law at camp and he was so proud to show us that he had learned to shoot a bow and arrow! But my favorite line is: "And the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend.". Longfellow sneaks in a wise moral lesson in this uplifting poem!

  Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.~~Robert Frost