My favorite definition of rainbow:
“All the wild-flowers of the forest,
When on earth they fade and perish,
Blossom in that heaven above us.”
Just a part of the classic heroic poem based on Indian legend -
“Hiawatha’s Childhood” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -
Watch the entire series “101 Famous Poems” at Vimeo.com/HulaInk.
One reason I love this classic American collection of poems is that it’s old-fashioned-ness: all our modern self-fascination and trendy irony is gone and in it’s place is good old inspiration and love of duty and purpose. I think a lot of us are so caught up in the concern of our time that we lose sight of the values our world were built on - it’s healthy for all of us to recall them to mind once in a while.
Thus the 101 Famous Poem Project - producing every poem in the collection as a stand-alone videobook on Vimeo.
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About the poet:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882) is best known for Paul Revere’s Ride, The Song of Hiawatha and Evangeline.
He was born in Portland, Maine and studied at Bowdoin College, where he became a professor, then moved to Harvard.
He retired from teaching in 1854 to focus on his writing, and lived the remainder of his life in the Revolutionary War headquarters of George Washington in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was married twice, and both wives died tragically.
He was a passionate abolitionist, the first American to translate Dante’s Divine Comedy and was probably the most
famous American poet of his time.
Hiawatha’s Childhood is a small section of the 22-chapter-long epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, based loosely on the legendary Ojibwe warrior Manabozho.
Longfellow learned the legends from the Ojibwe Chief Kahge-ga-gah-bowh, a friend, and took the spelling of Indian words from ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.
Gitche Gumee refers to Lake Superior (though that spelling is no longer in use), on whose shores the Ojibwe people lived.
Longfellow named his hero Hiawatha under the mistaken impression that it was synonymous with Manabozho.
The historical Hiawatha was a leader of the Onondaga people or the Mohawk people and co-founder of the Iroquois Confederacy, which is said to have contributed ideas to the American constitution.
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Who is Grumpy Old Writer?
E. T. Hansen is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction, in German and English, and lives in Berlin.
He writes fiction and non-fiction in English and German (Neuntöter, Blutbuche, Wassertöcher, Losing My Religion, The Cat Tales, Do Cats Have Souls?, The Art of Worldly Wisdom and more).
Many of his books and stories are published as complete videobooks on Vimeo.com/HulaInk.
You can support E.T. Hansen by:
- subscribing to Vimeo.com/HulaInk and sharing his videos;
- buying him a virtual whisky on PayPal.Me/HulaInk, or
- becoming a patron at Patreon.com/ETHansen.
But mostly I hope you enjoy and get something out of my work - Thanks for your support and I wish you all the love, luck and happiness in the world.
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Poets in this series include: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allen Poe, Alfred Tennyson, Percy Byssche Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Wadsworth, John Milton and more.
#WritingCommunity​​​ #writer​​​ #writerslife​​​ #writercommunity​​​ #writing​​​ #bookclub​​​ #book​​​ #readingcommunity​​​ #books​​​ #life #poetry #classicpoems #poems #readaloud
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The music used in this video is “Medal Ceremony” and was provided for without copyright restriction by Apple as part of the software package Final Cut Pro X.
The photo of the poet and the text from which his or her biographical notes were adapted are taken from Wikipedia.