Looking for something to write about today, I discovered that January 5 marks many interesting birthdays. (Thank you, Wikipedia.) Here are just a few:
On this day in 1885, the Italian-British poet Humbert Wolfe was born. Although his work is largely forgotten now, it was very popular during his lifetime (he died in 1940 on his birthday). His poetry was set to music by Gustav Holtz; he was also a translator of Heine. He is the author of this charming and witty poem:
The Grey Squirrel
Like a small grey
coffee-pot,
sits the squirrel.
He is not
all he should be,
kills by dozens
trees, and eats
his red-brown cousins.
The keeper on the
other hand,
who shot him, is
a Christian, and
loves his enemies,
which shows
the squirrel was not
one of those.
Today is also the birthday of George Reeves, the actor best known for playing the TV version of Superman. Reeves was born on this date in 1914 in Iowa and grew up in Illinois. His first movie role was as one of Scarlett O'Hara's suitors in Gone With The Wind, but he is, of course, remembered foremost as the first Man of Steel.
The circumstances of Reeves' death are one of the great mysteries of Hollywood. Although officially ruled a suicide, his shooting raised suspicions of murder and has been the subject of several books and the 2006 movie, Hollywoodland. In the film, Reeves is played by Ben Affleck; the fictional detective investigating his death is played by Adrian Brody. Here's the trailer:
Finally, January 5 is also the birthday of the late American poet, W.D. Snodgrass, who was born in 1926. Snodgrass' 1960 book, Heart's Needle, is considered one of the seminal works in so-called "confessional" poetry and won the Pulitzer Prize. Here, appropriate for a chilly winter day, is the first section of the title poem:
Child of my winter, born
When the new fallen soldiers froze
In Asia's steep ravines and fouled the snows,
When I was torn
By love I could not still,
By fear that silenced my cramped mind
To that cold war where, lost, I could not find
My peace in my will,
All those days we could keep
Your mind a landscape of new snow
Where the chilled tenant-farmer finds, below,
His fields asleep
In their smooth covering, white
As quilts to warm the resting bed
Of birth or pain, spotless as paper spread
For me to write,
And thinks: Here lies my land
Unmarked by agony, the lean foot
Of the weasel tracking, the thick trapper's boot;
And I have planned
My chances to restrain
The torments of demented summer or
Increase the deepening harvest here before
It snows again.
(P.S. – It's not really my birthday, too. Poetic license.)