<em>The Atlantic Daily</em>: ‘The Memory Shall Be Ours’

***

Your silent tents of green

We deck with fragrant flowers

Yours has the suffering been,

The memory shall be ours.

About this poem

“Decoration Day,” a remembrance honoring the Civil War dead, was first published in our June 1882 issue. As our poetry editor David Barber explains, the piece predates the Memorial Day holiday as we know it:

The poem pays tribute to what was then a new form of civic observance: a day set aside to commemorate those who had perished in the Civil War, by placing flags and flowers on soldiers’ graves, a custom that gradually gave rise to our modern Memorial Day honoring all who give their lives in military service. Its first readers likely felt an elegiac pang all the more acutely: By the time the poem circulated in the June 1882 Atlantic, it would have been national news that Longfellow had died just a few weeks earlier at his home in Cambridge, at the age of 75.

Four Adventure Reads

HIKE THE SIERRA WITH JOHN MUIR.

Decades before Yosemite Valley became a national park, Muir made a home for himself in the area. His journal entries from those years provide a window into a daily life full of wild beauty and free from responsibility: He leads a meandering months-long excursion with a flock of sheep at his heels, sleeps on a boulder beneath a waterfall, and faces off with more than one bear.

UNICYCLE UP AND DOWN MOUNTAINS.

Mountain biking? Too “safe and slow” for George Peck, who taught himself to ride a unicycle through boulder fields and along snow-crusted mountain trails, and even jump it over picnic tables. At the age of 56, he was still doing it, and he wasn’t alone: In a 1997 profile, the writer Michael Finkel detailed how Peck, through his strange obsession, helped invent a sport.

CLIMB THE WORLD’S TALLEST TREES.

A year later, Finkel went deep into the country’s national forests with the practitioners of another strange sport: technical tree climbing. He described an organization of hundreds of recreational climbers who dedicated their time to scaling immense and ancient trees in strong winds, through nasty injuries, and, at times, behind park rangers’ backs.

“The more stressful life on the ground becomes, the more some people feel the need to take time out in trees,” one climber told him.

SCALE PEAKS IN IRAN.

Climbing a 15,912-foot mountain as part of a cultural exchange in 2011, Gregory Crouch found himself navigating both political suspicions and a freezing thunderstorm. But the difficult ascent became a shared escape—and a bridge. “Mountains is free land,” one of his Iranian hosts observed. “Everybody in the mountains is member of this same country.”

If an escape to the mountains isn’t possible, here are a few slightly less adventurous suggestions for the holiday.

Get engrossed in a new book, whatever your mood. Our warm-weather reading list offers something for every craving, whether page-turners or tales of human connection.