A Poem to Lift Your Spirits: Longfellow’s Arrow and Song

Few consolations in life, let alone genuine treats which lighten life, compare with the discovery and preservation, care and tending of a good friendship, at once like the flight of an arrow, which may go anywhere, yet keeps the integrity of flight, and like a song, lost on the wind, sung with whimsy from the start, both singing and heard warm the heart.

The world these days seems both urgent and somehow caught, spinning in circles, half happy and the other half not, half of all the lessons we should never forget, forgot. But here is one from a great and good poet, one fun to read, and once read, you’ll know it.

Here is an old favorite to lift your day, to encourage singing and laughing as the best tonic for distress and dismay. From His Little Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, here is “The Arrow and the Song.”

“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.”

And there it is, short and sweet, an inspiration, not a dissertation, a little charm to chew on, a little lift, end-of-summer gift.