Over at that messageboard where I occasionally contribute hillbilly political commentary (but mostly BS), a friend and I got bored with the WV primary coverage--especially since it was called for Senator Clinton within two minutes of the polls closing--Anyway Moonstone, who is interested in astronomy, posted a picture of a lunar halo, which got me riffing on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "The Wreck of the Hesperus" which has a line about a lunar halo: "Last night the moon had a golden ring--"

Which set me off on a Web search for Longfellow's poems--specifically my favorite, "The Cross of Snow."

Longfellow (1807-1882) is best known for such poems as "Paul Revere's Ride," with its familiar opening

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere
On the eighteenth of April in 'seventy-five
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year. . .

the booklength "Song of Hiawatha":

On the shores of Gitchee Gumee
by the shining Big Sea Water

with its relentlessly percussive rhythm

and the wistful Acadian legend "Evangeline":

THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?

My favorite Longfellow poem, though, is "The Cross of Snow", quite possibly the most personal of all his works.

Longfellow's first wife died in October 1835 following a stillbirth, and he would write poems in her memory, but "The Cross of Snow" deals with the death in 1861 of his second wife, Frances Appleton. He had courted the spirited Fanny for seven years before she agreed to marry him, and she gave him six children. On July 9, 1861, Fanny was fatally burned when her dress caught fire; she died the next morning. Longfellow, who was severely burned trying to save her, was unable to attend her funeral. It is said that he grew a beard to cover the scars.

Longfellow never remarried. He devoted himself to poetry and to raising their five surviving children. In 1879, a photograph depicting the Rocky Mountains inspired him to write "The Cross of Snow" in Fanny's memory, in sonnet form.

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face--the face of one long dead--
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died, and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

The sonnet form has been used for many subjects in its long history: erotic love, travel, the transitory nature of fame--but never has it been used more effectively to describe grief than by Longfellow.

Morbid on this rainy day? No doubt. But its melancholy music fits today very well.

If anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.

Hey, y'all. I discover now, after not writing about books awhile, that I still have things to say about books after all. So I'm back--like your cure for insomnia.

One of my favorite writers of the past few years is Charlaine Harris. She writes series of mysteries, my favorite of which is the Southern Vampire Series.



I had read a couple of Harris's books from her Aurora Teagarden series. I can vividly remember the day I ran across the first books in the vampire series: in the sci-fi/fantasy section of a Bookland (sort of like a Books a Million). Those two were DEAD UNTIL DARK and LIVING DEAD IN DALLAS. They are about a world where vampires are--out of the coffin, so to speak, with nearly equal rights to humans, and other supernatural creatures, such as maenads, shapeshifters, witches, and fairies show up.

The stories are set in the fictional northern Louisiana town of Bon Temps. The first person narrator of the stories is Sookie Stackhouse, a barmaid in her mid-twenties who happens to be able to read minds. Since her "disability" makes it almost impossible to date human men (she can always tell what they're thinking), she is intrigued when a vampire named Bill Compton shows up in the bar where she works; SHE CANNOT READ HIS MIND.

Through her relationship with Bill (and yes, vampires can have "real" sex {at least these vamps can}, although they can't reproduce) Sookie becomes entangled in various investigations of crime--the first being the murder of her grandmother--in which she uses her mindreading skills to gather information. She also becomes a target of the Fellowship of the Sun, a group that wants to annihilate vampires.

I have to say that neither Sookie nor Bill are my favorite characters in the books; my favorite is Eric, the owner of a vampire bar in Shreveport who is also Bill's superior in the vampire hierarchy. Eric was a Viking when he was alive, which probably has something to do with why I prefer him to Bill; I've always had a weakness for Vikings, even though they were not cute or cuddly as humans and aren't any better as vampires. After Sookie and Bill break up, she and Eric are lovers for awhile, but Eric is afflicted with amnesia at the time and cannot remember a bit of it.

The books are funny, especially the first two, as Sookie learns to deal with "supes" and to harness her mindreading abilities so that she can "tune in" when she needs to pick up information and "tune out" when she needs to rest.

Other main characters include Sookie's brother, Jason; Sam, her boss at the bar, who is himself a shapeshifter; Pam, Eric's second in command in his various business dealings; and in the most recent books in the series, Quinn, Sookie's new boyfriend, himself a weretiger; and Amelia, a New Orleans witch who comes to be Sookie's roommate when a spell she works gets her into trouble with her coven. The books seldom mention events in the wider world, although Sookie does talk about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Harris also has provided a tongue in cheek explanation for the tabloid accounts of Elvis sightings: Elvis is now a vampire, but a bit slow-witted, the drugs in his system having interfered in the process of "bringing him across." He turns up in several of the books, doing work for other vamps and very occasionally singing.

The newest book in the series, FROM DEAD TO WORSE, comes out in hardback this month. I'm hoping it comes out in paperback REALLY soon!!

And if anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.