I’ve been fascinated lately with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish, and how he worked to include real people into his epic poem of the Mayflower and the settlement of Massachusetts. I have a personal connection with two of my great-grandparents, Samuel and Octavia Young. Samuel was the youngest boy in the family, the last to enlist in the Civil War, and the only one of the three Young brothers to survive the war. After the war ended, he married Octavia Montgomery, his childhood sweetheart. She could officially trace her ancestors directly to Priscilla Mullin and John Alden of Mayflower fame, the very same hero and heroine of Longfellow’s great American poem. “Speak for yourself, John Alden.”
It's like having Longfellow in your DNA.
As I began reading Hortensia, in winter: Poems by Megan Merchant, I was delighted to discover that Longfellow wasn’t the only poet to incorporate real people into his poems. Merchant’s “grandfather’s great-grandmother” was a pioneer woman named Hortensia Merchant, born in 1824 and died in 1905.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
Some Thursday Readings
Not the Halloween You Remember – Joe Carter at The Gospel Coalition.
Trick or Treat? The Trap of Our Desires – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review on Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Ray Bradbury’s “The Halloween Tree”: A Chilling Delight – Michael De Sapio at The Imaginative Conservative.
“When the Night Wind Howls,” poem by W.S. Gilbert – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.
My Mother’s Diary: “Who Am I?” – poem by Megan Willome.
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