Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Curley.

Today's poem is by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, an American poet who lived from 1807 to 1882.

You probably remember his works like Paul Revere's Ride, The Song of Hiawatha and Evangeline.

And you might know that he was also the first American to translate Dante's Divine Comedy.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called The Fire of Driftwood.

It's a little bit long, longer than most poems that I read on the show.

So I'm going to go ahead and dive right in.

This is how it goes.

We sat within the farmhouse old, whose windows looking over the bay, gave to the sea breeze damp and cold and easy entrance night and day. Not far away we saw the port, the strange, old-fashioned, silent town.

The lighthouse, the dismantled fort, the wooden houses, quaint and brown.

We sat and talked until the night descending filled the little room.

Our faces faded from the sight.

Our voices only broke the gloom. We spoke of many

a vanished scene of what we once had thought and said, what had been and might have been,

and who was changed and who was dead. And all that fills the hearts of friends when first they

feel with secret pain, their lives thenceforth have separate ends, and never can be one again.

The first slight swerving of the heart that words are powerless to express and leave it still unsaid in part or say it into great excess.

The very tones in which we spake had something strange.

I could but mark, the leaves of memory seemed to make a mournful rustling in the dark.

Often died the words upon our lips as suddenly from out the fire built of the wreck of stranded ships

the flames would leap and then expire

and as their splendor flashed and failed

...