Thanks a lot, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

...for writing the following poem in 1841:

The Rainy Day

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

Longfellow was born in 1807 and died in 1882, and in-between he wrote many poems that generations of American schoolchildren used to have to read and memorize portions of, including "The Village Blacksmith", "The Song Of Hiawatha", "Paul Revere's Ride", "Evangeline: A Tale Of Acadie".and the like. As I said, thanks a lot, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

It just so happens that today IS cold, and dark, and dreary, and if you cannot tell that this post is dripping with sarcasm. it is.

I liked Longfellow when I was younger ("Under a spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands; the smith, a mighty man is he with large and sinewy hands...", "Listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ridof Paul Revere; on the eighteenth of April in seventy-five, hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year...", "This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks...", "By the shores of Gitchee Gumee, by the Shining Big-Sea-Water, stood the wigwam of Nokomis, daughter of the moon Nokomis...", and so on, and so on). Nowadays I just find him irritating. Be thankful if you never had to commit his lines to memory because they would still be rolling around in the nether regions of your neo-cortex or your hippocampus or wherever it is that such things roll around.

Or maybe it's just that today is cold, and dark, and dreary; it rains, and the wind is never weary..."

Tomorrow is St. Lucy's Day, however, and I'm sure we'll all feel better after we walk around wearing long, flowing white dresses and lighted candles on top of our heads and singing "Santa Lucia." I mean, that's what I do every December 13th.

Don't you?