MR. LONGFELLOW AND HIS BOY

(An old-fashioned recitation to be read aloud)

Solo 1: Mr. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,

the Harvard Professor,

the poet whose pieces you see in all the schoolbooks,

All: “Tell me not in mournful numbers

life is but an empty dream….”

Solo 1: Mr. Longfellow sits in his Boston library writing,

Mr. Longfellow looks across the room

and sees his nineteen-year-old boy

propped up in a chair at a window, home from the war,

a rifle ball through right and left shoulders.

In his diary the father writes about his boy:

All: “He has a wound through him a foot long.

He pretends it does not hurt him.”

Solo 1: And the father if he had known

would have told the boy propped up in a chair

how one of the poems written in that room

made President Lincoln cry.

And both the father and the boy

would have smiled to each other and felt good

about why the President had tears over the poem.

Noah Brooks, the California newspaperman,

could have told the Longfellows how one day

Brooks heard the President saying two lines:

All: “Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!”

Noah Brooks, remembering more of the poem, speaks:

Solo 2: “Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears,

With all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

We know what Master laid thy keel,

What workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,

Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,

What anvils rang, what hammers beat,

In what a forge and what a heat

Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!

All: Fear not each sudden sound and shock,

‘Tis of the wave and not the rock;

And not a rent made by the gale!

In spite of rock and tempest’s roar,

In spite of false lights on the shore,

Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!

Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee,

All: Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,

Our faith triumphant o’er our fears,

Are all with thee—are all with thee!”

Solo 1: Noah Brooks sees Lincoln’s eyes filled with tears,

the cheeks wet.

They sit quiet a little while, then Lincoln saying:

Solo 3: “It is a wonderful gift to be able to stir men like that.”

Solo 1: Mr. Longfellow—and his boy sitting propped up in

a chair—

with bullet wound a foot long in his shoulders—

would have liked to hear President Lincoln saying those words.

Solo 1: Now Mr. Longfellow is gone far away, his boy, too,

gone far away,

and they never dreamed how seventy-eight years later

the living President of the United States, in the

White House at Washington,

takes a pen, writes with his own hand on a sheet of

paper

about the Union Ship of State sailing on and on –

never going down –

how the President hands that sheet of paper

to a citizen soon riding high in the air, high over

salt water,

All: high in the rain and the sun and the mist over

the Atlantic Ocean,

riding, pounding, flying, everything under control,

crossing the deep, wide Atlantic in a day, and a

night,

coming to London on the Thames in England,

standing before the First Minister of the United

Kingdom

so the whole English-language world

from England across North America to Australia

and New Zealand

can never forget Mr. Longfellow’s lines:

Solo 1: “Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!”