Famous Friendship Poem

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lived from 1807-1882. During this time, he traveled a lot and learned various languages. In this poem, Longfellow compares the arrow to life, and the songs are compared to feelings. Even though songs (feelings) are unseen, they are still real. The arrow could also be compared to negative words shot from our mouths, and the song could be joyful words shared with others.

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When I was a boy, my mother would read poetry and classic literature to me before I was even old enough to attend school. Longfellow's "The Arrow and the Song" was one I easily memorized, and...

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Famous Poem

The Arrow And The Song

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow By more Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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.

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  • Jim Grimes by Jim Grimes
  • 8 years ago

When I was a boy, my mother would read poetry and classic literature to me before I was even old enough to attend school. Longfellow's "The Arrow and the Song" was one I easily memorized, and I still recite it to my nieces and nephews fifty years later.
I particularly enjoyed Longfellow's "The Skeleton In Armor," and relished the woeful tale of lost love as told to the poet by a long-dead Viking warrior whose murderous heart was finally tamed by one more tender and compassionate. I was so fascinated by the imagery that I painstakingly researched the inspiration and origins of this ethereal account and, during a time when the internet didn't exist, this was an enormous task. Many years later, I was compelled to visit Fall River, Connecticut, where the real skeleton was discovered.
Thanks entirely to men like Longfellow, Dickens, Dumas, Poe and many others who possessed the ability to paint such vivid pictures with words, I learned to read quite well by the age of three.

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