“The Barefoot Boy” by John Greenleaf Whittier. 1855. Public domain. (buy now)

Blessings on thee, little man,
Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!
With thy turned-up pantaloons,
And thy merry whistled tunes;
With thy red lip, redder still
Kissed by strawberries on the hill;
With the sunshine on thy face,
Through thy torn brim’s jaunty grace:
From my heart I give thee joy—
I was once a barefoot boy!

O, for boyhood’s painless play,
Sleep that wakes in laughing day,
Health that mocks the doctor’s rules,
Knowledge never learned of schools,

O, for boyhood’s time of June,
Crowding years in one brief moon,
When all things I heard or saw
Me, their master, waited for.
I was rich in flowers and trees,
Humming-birds and honey bees;
Mine the sand-rimmed pickerel pond,
Mine the walnut slopes beyond,
Mine, on bending orchard trees,
Apples of Hesperides!

Cheerily, then, my little man,
Live and laugh, as boyhood can!
Though the flinty slopes be hard,
Stubble-speared the new-mown sward,
Every morn shall lead thee through
Fresh baptisms of the dew;
Every evening from thy feet
Shall the cool wind kiss the heat:
All too soon these feet must hide
In the prison cells of pride,
Lose the freedom of the sod,
Like a colt’s for work be shod,
Ah! that thou couldst know thy joy,
Ere it passes, barefoot boy!

On this day in 1903, Marie Curie, still a doctoral student, announced her discovery of radium, for which she won her first of two Nobel Prizes. That evening, at a party in her honor, the guests went out to the garden and her husband Pierre pulled a little tube out of his pocket. Suddenly the tube started to glow, lighting up the darkness. But the guests could see that Pierre’s fingers were scarred and that he was finding it hard to hold the tube. He was holding radium.

It’s the birthday of the man who wrote a big best-seller about a boy and a tiger in a lifeboat: Yann Martel, (books by this author) born on this day in Salamanca, Spain (1963). His father was a Canadian diplomat, and he grew up in Alaska, British Columbia, Costa Rica, France, Ontario, and Mexico.

He was feeling burnt out and had no idea what to do with his life, so he went to India, where he felt even worse. He was lonely, and he tried to write a novel but it failed. He left Bombay for Matheran, a quiet hill station where all motor vehicles were outlawed. And it was there, sitting on a boulder, that he suddenly thought of a book review he had read many years ago. The book was by a Brazilian writer, and its premise was that a German Jewish family who owned a zoo tried to escape to Brazil, but the ship ended up sinking and one family member was left alone in a lifeboat with a black panther. Martel loved the premise, and so he made it his own.

He went back to Canada and wrote a story about an Indian teenager named Pi Patel, who calls himself a Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. Pi is the son of a zookeeper, and his family leaves India for Canada to begin life there. They are shipwrecked, and Pi ends up in a lifeboat with a few animals, and eventually, only a tiger named Richard Parker. In 2001, Martel published the book, Life of Pi, which became a best-seller and won the Booker Prize.

It’s the birthday of best-selling children’s author and illustrator Eric Carle, (books by this author) born on this day in Syracuse, New York (1929). When he was six years old, his family moved to Stuttgart, Germany, to be with their extended family, and so Carle grew up in Germany during WWII. He went to art school, then moved to New York where he said: “The long, dark time of growing up in wartime Germany, the cruelly enforced discipline of my school years there, the dutifully performed work at my jobs in advertising — all these were finally losing their rigid grip on me. The child inside me — who had been so suddenly and sharply uprooted and repressed — was beginning to come joyfully back to life.”

Eric Carle has written and illustrated more than 70 books, including Do You Want to Be My Friend? (1971), The Grouchy Ladybug (1977), and his most famous, The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969), which has sold almost 30 million copies.

He said: “We have eyes, and we’re looking at stuff all the time, all day long. And I just think that whatever our eyes touch should be beautiful, tasteful, appealing, and important.”

It’s the birthday of novelist and essayist George Orwell (books by this author), born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal, India (1903). He didn’t care for his birth name; he found “Eric” too Norse and “Blair” too Scottish. When he began writing in earnest, he adopted what he felt was a solidly English name; his surname comes from the River Orwell in East Anglia.

His father was a British civil servant, and the family was, in Orwell’s words, “upper lower middle class”; nevertheless, the boy went to several exclusive boarding schools, including Eton, on a scholarship. He didn’t enjoy the experience, feeling alienated from his well-to-do classmates, and chose not to go on to Oxford or Cambridge. He became a military policeman instead, serving in Burma, where he came to hate imperialism, totalitarianism, and the class system. He returned to England a literary and political rebel. He called himself an anarchist for many years, and later a socialist who was nonetheless critical of the existing socialist movement.

He’s most famous for his anti-communist and dystopian novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), but he was also a master of literary nonfiction, using deceptively straightforward prose to describe moments of personal insight. His 1931 essay “A Hanging” describes his role in the execution of a prisoner in Burma:

“At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. … He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.”

Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) was a retelling of time he spent among the poor in England and Europe; The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) was both a pro- and anti-socialist look at unemployed miners in the north of England. His posthumously published essay “Such, Such Were the Joys …” (1952) recalled his boarding school days and the classism he encountered there.

He also wrote an essay decrying the abuse of language by politicians and the media, called “Politics and the English Language” (1946). In it, he includes five rules for effective written communication:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(v) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

On this day in 1876, the Battle of the Little Bighorn — also known as “Custer’s last stand” — took place in Montana. Lieutenant George Armstrong Custer led the 7th Cavalry against a band of Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapahoe Indians who refused to give up the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory and return to the reservation. The Indians, led by Crazy Horse, Gall, and Sitting Bull, wiped out Custer and every man in the five companies that were with him. (The only survivor was a horse, Comanche, who became a celebrity at military parades.) Custer’s last stand proved to be the Lakotas’ last stand as well; white Americans were outraged at the battle’s outcome, especially falling as it did so near to the country’s centennial on July 4, and soon the band was forced to surrender, losing the Black Hills to white settlers.

Custer remains a complicated figure in American history, part Civil War hero, part martyr, and part blundering egomaniac. He wasn’t tactically brilliant so much as he was brave and lucky. But his death inspired many a poet to write elegiac verses to his martyrdom. Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote a lengthy tribute in iambic pentameter (Custer, 1896), including the following stanza:

A second’s silence. Custer dropped his head,
His lips slow moving as when prayers are said —
Two words he breathed — ‘God and Elizabeth,’
Then shook his long locks in the face of death
And with a final gesture turned away
To join that fated few who stood at bay.
Ah! deeds like that the Christ in man reveal
Let Fame descend her throne at Custer’s shrine to kneel.

In A.H. Laidlaw’s poem “Custer” (1898), he is less tragic Christ-like figure, more super-hero:

Straight on his steed doth he meet the grim battle,
The red line of danger grows deadly and large,
Loud from the hills rings the rifleman’s rattle,
But Custer is ready, so forward and charge!

Firing with left hand, and fencing with right,
The reins in his teeth, like a handless young Hun,
What is his fate in the terrible fight?
The thousands hath slain him, yet Custer hath won.

Even Walt Whitman fired off a sonnet on hearing the news of Custer’s death, later published in Leaves of Grass as “From Far Dakota’s Cañons”:

From far Dakota’s cañons,
Lands of the wild ravine, the dusky Sioux, the lonesome stretch, the silence,
Haply to-day a mournful wail, haply a trumpet-note for heroes.

The battle-bulletin,
The Indian ambuscade, the craft, the fatal environment,
The cavalry companies fighting to the last in sternest heroism,
In the midst of their little circle, with their slaughter’d horses for breastworks,
The fall of Custer and all his officers and men.

Continues yet the old, old legend of our race,
The loftiest of life upheld by death,
The ancient banner perfectly maintain’d,
O lesson opportune, O how I welcome thee!
As sitting in dark days,
Lone, sulky, through the time’s thick murk looking in vain for light, for hope,
From unsuspected parts a fierce and momentary proof,
(The sun there at the centre though conceal’d,
Electric life forever at the centre,)
Breaks forth a lightning flash.

Thou of the tawny flowing hair in battle,
I erewhile saw, with erect head, pressing ever in front, bearing a bright sword in thy hand,
Now ending well in death the splendid fever of thy deeds,
(I bring no dirge for it or thee, I bring a glad triumphal sonnet,)
Desperate and glorious, aye in defeat most desperate, most glorious,
After thy many battles in which never yielding up a gun or a color
Leaving behind thee a memory sweet to soldiers,
Thou yieldest up thyself.