“Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands…”
“O no, Dad, not again!”
That was my youthful reaction to my dad’s quoting of the one poem he remembered from eighth grade, the last grade he attended as a farm boy shortly before the First World War. It was the beginning of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s classic, “The Village Blacksmith,” a poem I eventually memorized myself in a time of nostalgia long after my dad’s journey to Glory. He’d quote it whenever any of us kids came home and recited poems we’d learned in school—and then he’d go on with, “You’re a poet and don’t know it; your feet show it—because they’re long fellows”: long feet being something that could be said about most of us boys of Dutch stock.
