Poetry with Longfellow

There was a little girl
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

 

There was a little girl,

            Who had a little curl,

Right in the middle of her forehead.

            When she was good,

            She was very good indeed,

But when she was bad she was horrid.

Longfellow's second son Ernest says of this poem,

It was while walking up and down with his second daughter, then a baby in his arms, that my father composed and sang to her the well-known lines .... Many people think this a Mother-Goose rhyme, but this is the true version and history

I love this poem...it was one of the first I ever learned. I always imagined myself as the girl with the curl.

Learning to write again?

Happy New Year everyone…hope you survived the holidays. Now that it's all over, it’s time to reexamine our lives and ask, what can we change this year? What can we do better? Resolutions have been made to work out and eat better, to improve oneself in every way possible, but these broad goals are quickly forgotten (at least by me). So instead, I made a small goal.

One of my Tyler MED classmates is a regular blogger and during our final speeches last semester, she noted that her blog functions mainly as a personal log of her thoughts and artistic inspirations. My classmate described how throughout her life, she always kept journals. I too, kept journals, beginning when I was about age 16. They are a wonderful way to record thoughts and little drawings. However, one problem is that these journals get hidden on shelves or boxed away in memento boxes, lost in time. My peer described how her blog essentially became her new journal. She doesn’t know if anyone reads her blog regularly nor does she really care; the blog functions to help her organize her thoughts, like the journals did year’s prior. Although it isn’t as simple as writing in a notebook, or as artistically glamorous (no need to write furiously alone in the corner of the coffee shop), I knew that I needed to renew my commitment to this blog. I had given up writing in a journal long ago, but that was a mistake. Writing is a wonderful way to organize one’s thoughts and take stock of life. It took graduate school and struggling through huge papers to make me realize that I had lost something when I stopped writing for myself.

So here goes. I vow to return to my old habits of journal writing (albeit disguised as a blog).  Thanks for the inspiration, Marie (my classmate).  Check out her very organized blog @ http://colored-thread.blogspot.com/