Carol Strickland's Blog

Literary agents! I’m seeking representation for A Fuller Life, my novel set in 1850 Concord, Massachusetts. The protagonist is pioneering feminist writer Margaret Fuller and her literary friends Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. They’re now stars of the Golden Age of American lit, while Fuller (more brilliant than them) is mostly forgotten.
The novel shows her as a true revolutionary and her colleagues with all their hang-ups. It’s a different view of an important time in history and brings Concord, a cradle of creativity, to life.

Turkey has just been awarded the 2014 Trip Advisor Traveler’s Choice award as the #1 place tourists want to visit. Istanbul was voted the top travel destination, outranking Rome, Paris, New York, and London. In 2013 Turkey was already the sixth most visited country, with 35 million visitors.

All visitors to Istanbul goggle in amazement at Justinian’s creation, the Hagia Sophia basilica. A description of its conception and construction follows. Photos of the interior and exterior are on my Pinterest page: http://www.pinterest.com/carol8276/ha...


Let me tell you how I got interested in one of the main characters in my novel, Emperor Justinian of 6th-century Constantinople. My day job is writing about the history of art and architecture, and Justinian produced one of the all-time greatest monuments of the ancient world: the Hagia Sophia basilica in what’s now Istanbul. The church, whose name means Holy Wisdom, wasn’t just built under his aegis. It was conceived by him, financed by him, and micro-managed by him. People talk about his revising the Roman law code, which became the basis for all Western law, or his vision of reconquering the lost lands of the Roman Empire. Those achievements earned him the moniker Justinian the Great. Yet to my mind, his most sublime legacy is this church, still standing and still stunning.

The first church on the site was built by Emperor Constantine who founded Constantinople in 330 CE. Discontented rebels burned it to the ground in 532. Most people saw a smoldering ruin; Justinian saw an opportunity. Just forty days after the basilica toppled, Justinian had a plan for a new cathedral, the most spectacular in the world.

One of his outstanding talents was an eye for spotting talent in others. To construct his dream of a monument to outshine anything then known, Justinian tapped two mathematicians: Isidore of Miletus, an expert on vaulting, and Anthemius of Tralles, a geometrician and engineer. Their grasp of theory was probably firmer than their practical experience. That’s why they were able to imagine a structure so audacious, more practiced architects would never have attempted it. A contemporary historian described the task: “to apply geometry to solid matter.”

Justinian gave them an unlimited budget. He canvassed the Empire for skilled artisans and materials. Word went out to all corners of the Mediterranean to send whatever fragments of Classical architecture could be re-purposed for the structure. Porphyry columns and multi-colored marble began arriving from Libya, Egypt, Syria, and all over Anatolia.

The most astounding fact about this building—which has stood for nearly 1500 years—is that it was built in less than six years. Compare that to European cathedrals that took centuries to complete. How did Justinian do it? He appointed 100 foremen, each supervising 100 men for a total of 10,000 engaged in the project. He divided them into two teams: 5,000 on the northern end and 5,000 on the southern, in competition.

Each day the Emperor, clutching a staff and wearing a white linen tunic with a kerchief on his head to ward off the brick dust, visited the construction site to survey the day’s progress. Each day he paid the workers in silver coins, encouraging them and praising their work.

The riskiness of the endeavor was excessive. Not only is the church planted in an active earthquake zone, but the design was far beyond the technology of the time. Never had such a vast dome (100 feet across and 180 feet high) existed, and it was not exceeded until the 16th century. Putting a gigantic, circular dome on a square space had never been done either. Indeed, not until modern times was there such a huge, open, unsupported expanse under one roof.

Its colossal scale and revolutionary design match the Emperor’s ambition. He too planned to be unparalleled in history. When Justinian’s architects came to him quavering in fear, lamenting that the dome wouldn’t hold, he reassured them. The piers were cracking and seemed on the point of collapse, but Justinian, a devout believer, commanded them to continue building the four massive arches that support the dome until they met in the center. When the keystones were inserted, he promised, they would support each other.

Justinian’s court historian, Procopius, tells the story. “Anthemius and Isidore, terrified, told the Emperor that their technical skill was insufficient to save it, and straightaway the Emperor…commanded them to carry the curve of this arch to its final completion, saying, ‘For when it rests upon itself, it will no longer need the props beneath it’.”

The architects “carried out his instructions, and the whole arch hung secure, sealing by experiment the truth of his idea.” Procopius adds, “It was not with money alone that the Emperor built it, but also with labor of the mind and with the other powers of the soul.”

Unhampered by practical considerations, Justinian had faith in his novel structure. Later, when the huge piers were flaking under the weight of the superstructure, the architects again sought his counsel. “And again the Emperor met the situation with a remedy,” Procopius reports. He ordered the upper parts of the strained masonry removed and reconstructed after the mortar was dry. It worked.

Around Christmas of 537 the church was dedicated. Justinian marched in procession from his palace and entered the vestibule with the Patriarch. Then, alone, he strode to the ivory-and-silver pulpit and examined his creation. “Solomon,” he is said to have murmured, “I have surpassed thee!”

Justinian surpassed himself in celebrating. At a lavish banquet for his court and citizens, he roasted 6000 sheep, 1000 each of oxen, pigs and poultry, along with 500 deer.

Praise for his creation was immediate. The dome, perforated at its base by a ring of 40 arched windows (permitting shafts of light to irradiate the interior) still inspires wonder, seeming “not to rest upon solid masonry but to cover the space beneath as though suspended from heaven.” The whole, Procopius wrote, is “marvelous in its grace, but by reason of the seeming insecurity of its composition altogether terrifying. For it somehow seems to float in the air on no firm basis, but to be poised aloft to the peril of those inside it.”

The polychrome marble revetments on walls and floors are rainbow-bright. Justinian ordered marbles in all colors cut into panels, matching the patterns of their veining, in alternating bands of color: blue, red, purple, and green. “One might imagine that he had come upon a meadow with its flowers in full bloom,” according to Procopius.

Thousands of silver lamps hung from long, brass chains to illuminate the interior, and sparkling gold mosaics glowed on vaults and arches. “Thus through the spaces of the great church come rays of light, expelling clouds of care, and filling the mind with joy,” a contemporary poet wrote. Justinian may have been a lowborn peasant—in fact, the son of a pig farmer—but his creation is a lofty achievement, “soaring upward to the blue…even to the choirs of the stars,” the poet added.

Like Augustus, who famously said, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble,” Justinian was unsurpassed as an imperial builder. The cost was immense: 320,000 pounds of gold. But its colossal scale and unprecedented splendor equaled his ambitions. Even today the Hagia Sophia inspires awe.

The Crusaders were not so awestruck as to defer plundering. On the Fourth crusade in 1204, on their way to the Holy Land, they dug up Justinian’s tomb. To their amazement, after 639 years, the corpse was fully intact. To get to the loot inside, they unceremoniously dumped the Emperor’s mortal remains from the sarcophagus.

A huge, gilt-bronze equestrian statue of Justinian also met an undignified fate. It had stood at the center of a forum for a thousand years, but in the sixteenth century Turks melted it down to make cannons.

One of the titles I considered for my novel was Nothing Gold Can Stay, the name of a poem by Robert Frost. Frost notes how everything radiant and glittery eventually becomes tarnished and ordinary. The shining dawn becomes dull day. Eye-catching, fragrant flowers give way to plain leaves, just as “Eden sank to grief”.

True, youth becomes age, dreams give way to reality, and stars fall. Yet for me, the Hagia Sophia is an example of one man’s peerless vision. It became a mosque in 1453 and a museum in 1935, but its eternal form still inspires us to dare, to imagine, to strive, and not to let the light go out.

Sex and the City (Constantinople)
Thanks to a 1996 essay by Claudine Dauphin, I can say with certainty that sex (along with religion) was an overriding obsession in sixth-century Constantinople, the setting for my novel The Eagle and the Swan. Obviously, when writing about the heroine, Theodora, an ex-prostitute portrayed as lusty and lascivious by her court historian Procopius, sex was a topic the book couldn’t gloss over. Thanks to Dauphin’s research, I have scholarly proof that sexcapades were as common—and ardently sought—as chariot-racing in the city on the Bosphorus.
To summarize Dauphin’s findings, let’s start with the Greco-Roman unholy trinity: wife, concubine and courtesan. Fourth-century BC Athenian orator Apollodoros declared, “We have courtesans for pleasure and concubines for the daily service of our bodies, but wives for the production of legitimate offspring and to have reliable guardians of our household property”. This domestic triad persisted in the Roman period: legal monogamy and sub rosa polygamy. After Christianity came along, husbands were supposed to forego concubines, but dalliance with courtesans continued to flourish.
Holiness and debauchery, Christian asceticism and lust existed side by side. Even a pilgrimage destination like Jerusalem housed numerous “abodes of lust”. Outside the city, prostitutes were known to stalk monks in their caves. In the fifth-century AD, rabbis proclaimed that any bachelor who could remain chaste in a large city was without doubt extremely pious. The city (especially a port like Constantinople) was considered a pit of iniquity, temptation and sin. Innkeepers readily offered harlots to regular clients and travelers.
Erotic graffiti in the sixth century depict salacious encounters with prostitutes. Streetwalkers called scortae erraticae or ambulatrices solicited customers in alleys as well as public squares. Rabbi Judah huffed about the Romans: “They built market-places to set harlots in them”. Harlots worked either at home or for a pimp. Justinian’s mid-sixth-century law required pimps to provide housing for young peasant girls they purchased in the boondocks. Of course, housing might be only a shack or room in the red-light district, the seediest part of town.
In city taverns and staging posts for change of mounts or overnight stays along the network of Roman roads, barmaids met all the needs of travellers, serving wine, dancing, and providing more intimate entertainment. The Codex Justinianus exempted barmaids from prosecution for adultery, acknowledging their second shift as prostitutes. To spare them temptation, clergy were forbidden from entering these establishments.
Prostitution in brothels called lupanaria or fornices was widespread. The prostitutes were often slaves belonging to a pimp. Cells of the Pompeii lupanarium contained a stone bed and a bolster, with a back door so clients could patronize the establishment in privacy. Soliciting at the Baths was commonplace.
Two classes of Byzantine harlots existed: actresses and courtesans (scenicae) and poor girls (pornai) trading rural poverty for golden dreams in Constantinople before being hooked by pimps. Among the theatrical troupe, daughters succeeded their mothers, just as Theodora’s mom pushed her three daughters on stage in bawdy plays. The poet Horace described girls dancing seductively at banquets, causing Bishop Jacob to label dancing “mother of all lasciviousness”, which “incites by licentious gestures to commit odious acts”. One sixth-century mosaic portrays a castanet-clapping dancer in translucent muslin next to a clearly aroused satyr.
John of Ephesus refers to Justinian’s consort as “Theodora who came from the brothel”. Long before puberty, Theodora allegedly worked in a bordello where, according to Procopius, she could only provide sexual services like a “male prostitute” until she became sexually mature. Then she went on stage and became a courtesan. As an actress, she was famous for her stripteases and profligacy at banquets. After a brief tenure as concubine in Libya, Theodora (according to Procopius) applied her talents throughout the East before bewitching Justinian and becoming Empress.
Such an astronomical rise from the depths of degradation to the height of grandeur was rare. Few courtesans advanced socially in this phenomenal way. Most prostitutes were slaves or illiterate peasants without legal status, called meretrix, “she who makes money from her body”. Pimps paid a few coins to buy a peasant girl from her needy parents, giving the girls only clothes and food as salary. When Theodora paid off pimps to free the prostitutes, it cost five gold coins for each, the equivalent price for a camel but less than for a she-ass or a slave boy. Inflation had caused prices to climb since the days of Pompeii and Rome, when a harlot’s services cost two asses (the price of a loaf of bread or two cups of wine at a tavern). The cheapest prostitute apparently cost the same as a mouthful of boiled chick peas. Without clients for several days, prostitutes would lack even this sustenance and go hungry.
Once the Christian church condemned non-procreative sexual intercourse, homosexuality and male prostitution were outlawed in the Western Empire. In 390, an edict threatened the death penalty for forcing or selling of males into prostitution. In Rome, male prostitutes were dragged out of brothels and burned alive as a mob cheered. In the Eastern Empire male prostitution remained legal, although saddled with an imperial tax, until 533 when Justinian denounced both homosexual relations and adultery, punishable by death.
As early as 529, Emperor Justinian had tried to curb female child prostitution by penalizing anyone engaged in the trade, especially owners of brothels. To combat sex trafficking, he nullified contracts in 535 by which pimps put peasant girls to work. This vilification represented a change from Roman times when pedophilia involved small boys. In Constantinople, little girls (some younger than ten) were the primary victims. Abandoned children often supplied the sex market, since nearly all unwanted babies who were exposed ended up as as prostitutes.
Excavation of a Byzantine bordello in Ephesus yielded a gruesome discovery: the bones of nearly 100 infants in a sewer under the bathhouse. The presence of intact infant bones indicates that the infants were thrown into the drain soon after their birth. It appears the prostitutes used the Baths not only to seek clients but also as a dump for disposing of unwanted offspring.
Saint Augustine had practical counsel on the efficacy of prostitutes. “Banish prostitutes … and you reduce society to chaos through unsatisfied lust”. In his City of God, marital contraception was unnecessary. The harlot’s role was to prevent a randy husband from impregnating his wife, for if a man was seized by a non-procreative urge, he could conveniently expel his sperm into a prostitute.
As early as the Great Flood in Genesis narratives, a man would marry two women, one to bear children, and another for sexual pleasure. The latter drank a “cup of roots” as a contraceptive and was supposed to dress alluringly like a mistress. By the time of early Byzantium, things had changed for the worse. The Church’s insistence on sexual repression led to eroticism and the need for prostitutes. While at home sexuality was confined to procreation, pleasure was sought among harlots. Christianity fostered prudishness in theory and licentiousness in fact, causing a boom in Byzantine prostitution and increase in abandoned children. Just as the Victorian brothel was the offshoot of bourgeois propriety, so the Christian emphasis on spirituality and suspicion of bodily pleasure led to hypocrisy and corruption.

[Note: I’m indebted to Tom Sawford’s Byzantine blog for featuring the article, published in Classics Ireland (http://www.classicsireland.com/1996/D...) vol 3, which I’ve paraphrased and considerably condensed.]

My new historical novel The Eagle and the Swan is available on amazon's kindle site (for kindle or iPad) at http://www.amazon.com/Eagle-Swan-Caro...
Only $4.99 with 30% off before Dec.1st. Check out the website http://www.theeagleandtheswan.com for info. Set in 6th-century Constantinople, it shows one of the most remarkable(and unknown) women of late antiquity in all her complexity. Notorious in her day, we owe a debt to a Empress Theodora in ours.

Early on, I thought of calling my historical novel True Confessions, since much of it is couched as confession to my fictional monk, Fabianus. Now I confess that part of the impetus behind writing The Eagle and the Swan—to give voice to a misunderstood woman, Empress Theodora of 6th-century Constantinople—derived from an autobiographical source.
Theodora began life as the circus bear-keeper’s daughter. She became an actress, stripper, and prostitute, the lowest of the low in Late Roman society. What drew me inexorably to her story was my own mother’s horrific childhood.
My mother was born on a dirt-poor farm in the rural South, not even in a town but between the two hamlets of Andalusia and Opp, Alabama. Dirt-poor doesn’t begin to describe it, for there was no rich, black soil but hardscrabble red clay. It’s the kind of clay that’s impenetrable to the plow but sucks up rainfall, eroding in deep gulleys that leach away freshly planted seeds and all hope for bettering one’s life.
When I visited the farm as a child, I didn’t see the soul-choking struggle imposed by poverty. It was like going to a particularly primitive camp, mysterious because so alien to my usual life in suburban New Orleans.
Gathering eggs in the henhouse was a scary adventure. I’d pinch my nose to shut out the acrid smell of guano, then I’d dart my hand quickly under the hens’ soft feather breasts, scratching my fingers on the straw nests. If I was brave enough to persevere despite the hens’ scolding, I’d emerge with a reddish-brown egg (still warm from the hens’ bodies) to nestle on a folded cloth in my tin bucket.
I was equally inept when it came to milking a cow. My grandmother, in a shapeless cotton dress with her long gray hair in a single braid streaming down her back, wrenched and squeezed a teat like an automaton. The stream of milk squirted into the pail in a gush of white liquid. But when I sat on the low stool, my head leaning against the cow’s velvety flank, and tentatively squeezed and pulled, nothing happened except the cow turning to look at me with a baleful eye.
Toilet facilities on the farm were a falling-down wooden outhouse that smelled to high heaven. A plank had two side-by-side holes cut into the wood grain. Wiping was accomplished with a denuded corncob or the proverbial pages from a Sears & Roebuck catalogue, the kind country folk called the “Wish Book.”
Bathing was a public event. First you went to the well to draw pails of water that came clack-clacking up as you turned the crank. Then you heated water in the kitchen on a coal-black wood stove. Next you hauled the sloshing water out past the front porch to the dooryard in front of the two-room farmhouse and splashed it into a big, oval tin tub. There, before an audience of family members, you could lie back and soak or scrub off the clay dust.
The farm seemed strange to me, a city girl, when we visited from New Orleans. But I liked sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair and shelling peas straight from the garden. Or sitting under the scuppernong arbor and picking the grape-like fruit, sucking its sweet-sour flesh before spitting out the pit.
It was like an exotic vacation before we headed back in the station wagon to our big, well-appointed house in a green suburb with all the comforts of air conditioning, television and stereo playing Elvis.
Childhood hadn’t been playful for Mother, the oldest daughter of seven surviving children. Her parents—I remember their wiry bodies and weathered faces—jerked her out of school at thirteen, as soon as the law allowed. From that tender age, she was virtually enslaved to the household, doing all the cooking and much of the chores and childcare. Since her parents were uneducated, they had no desire for their daughter to learn. What were girls good for, but to bear children and take care of the family?
I knew nothing of this background. I only knew my mother and father met during World War II, when she worked in a factory making uniforms for soldiers. Daddy was a surgeon and took out her appendix before they started courting. Through the years of growing up in a secure, comfortable home, I never heard anything about Mother being mistreated. Yet I knew there were skeletons in her family closet.
I’d heard whispers about Uncle Clayton, who hung himself in a closet. Uncle Claude was a drunk, and we took in his daughter Betty to live with us. Uncle Hampton also lived with us while he dried out. (A master carpenter, he crafted a beautiful highboy secretary in my father’s workshop.) Only Mother’s youngest brother, red-haired Uncle Leon, a former Master Sergeant in the Army, was in her good graces, well-loved. When we visited his farm in Georgia, he taught me how to gig frogs in the swamp at night. Watch out for poisonous water moccasins attracted to the lantern, he said. Be sure the trident is sharp before you spear them.
Of my two aunts, Lula was said to have been a great beauty in her youth but mostly bickered with her husband Uncle Hubert. She admonished me to always wear clean underpants in case of being whisked to the hospital without time to prepare. (As if the worst outcome for an ER visit would be the discovery of dingy underwear.) Aunt Lula had lost a twin, burned by scalding water when a toddler, so I guess she came by her expertise on accidents through hard experience.
Aunt Myrtis Lee was a sadder case. Born at home, her head had been warped in the birth canal by the too forceful application of forceps. Her twin had not survived the ordeal, but Myrtis Lee lived, though disabled. She talked haltingly and was said to be simple-minded, although she boasted to me of having read the entire Bible. She dragged one leg and one wrist was permanently skewed, with the hand turned inward toward her body. We used to visit her in the cruelly named Home for Incurables where she resided. When she came to our house for Sunday dinner, Myrtis Lee always cried when we took her back.
I remember when my Girl Scout troop sang Christmas carols at the Home. I studiously avoided looking at the patients’ faces for fear of encountering my aunt’s gaze. I doubt any other chorister has serenaded the unfortunate with “Angels We Have Heard on High” while staring fixedly at the ground.
What I didn’t know about my mother could have filled a book. I was living in my college town, just turned twenty-one, when Mother summoned me to New Orleans one weekend. What was so urgent? Why did I have to go when I had plans? She accepted no excuse, so I went home.
Mother stuck by my side the whole weekend. Her main intent seemed to be to hold my hand, smooth my hair and hold me close. She took me with her to the Texaco station, where some customer-incentive program was going on. Each time she bought gas, she got a stamp to put on a grid that looked like a bingo card. If you filled up the card, you’d win some gigantic prize.
Mother was obsessed with this game, which she called a “puzzle.” She urged me to use the car and then zoom to the gas station for a gallon of gas and the precious stamp. Bitterly, she speculated that the game must be rigged, since she’d been trying to fill her cards for so long. One stamp, intended to be glued to a big hole smack in the middle of the card, remained elusive.
Mother had never been irrational before. I didn’t know what to make of this fixation. The previous summer, she’d had an episode where she lay in a hospital bed unable to speak, her Willoware blue eyes staring straight ahead without acknowledging anyone’s existence. The term “post-traumatic stress disorder” was unknown. My father was a Latin-quoting neurosurgeon, but he had no idea how to handle her shutdown.
At least she was talking now, although what she said seemed crazy. I remember when she took me back to the airport, she drove so slowly I thought I’d miss the flight. Before each traffic light she slowed to a crawl, hoping, she explained, for a red light. That way she could stop and then safely venture forth with a “fresh, green light”. She wanted to avoid the dread of having to speed through a yellow light—neither here nor there, neither stop nor go—maddeningly ambiguous.
Mother stood so close to me at the airport, pulling me into line when I tried to put some distance between us, hissing that I’d lose my place. Her eyes never left my face, and she was in tears when I boarded the plane.
She phoned soon after and cried on the other end of the line, saying, “I can’t take it any more”. She had excruciating back pain, stomach ailments and Lord only knows what else.
Soon after that, barely fifty-six years old, she was gone. Shot through the heart by her own hand after working for days to clean the house, waxing the wood floors to a high shine, polishing the silver. Momma shot herself in bed, then got up to put the bloody sheet in the bathtub so it wouldn’t stain the mattress. On the way back to bed, she collapsed, breaking a windowpane with her head. She slumped to the floor, no longer breathing. Chips of glass rested on her cheeks like solidified tears.
I later heard she’d practiced with the pistol. She shot the gun in the bathroom one day to see how it worked. Only our maid Louise was home to hear it. “They never let me shoot when I was a girl,” Mother told Louise when she came running. “They taught the boys but not me. But now I know.” Mother put a band-aid over the burned hole in the wall, leaking plaster. “As long as the band-aid is there to cover the hole, it’s alright,” she told Louise.
Mother left a suicide note, typed on our Selectric typewriter since her hands shook too much to write legibly. It was in the cardboard shoebox with all the stamps and half-filled cards from the gas-station game. Addressed to me, the note (with misspellings that show her disordered mind) read: “No autoopsy is necessary. I have cilled myself. Carol, please take care of Daddy and the boys. These stamps are for you. If you can put them together right, you can finish the puzzle and win the prize.”
My father sat my brothers and me down. He wanted to explain the inexplicable. Mother had bad memories, he said. She married young to escape her family, but her first husband was vicious. When she got pregnant he beat and kicked her, shoving her down the stairs, until she miscarried. She’d so wanted children, my father said. That was why she’d had me and my two brothers, bang, bang, bang: three babies in four years.
But the worst, Daddy confessed, was that her father and older brother had raped her. He didn’t say more. Only that she escaped the abuse as soon as she could.
How had I never suspected? Why had I been so humiliated at her lack of education, her lapses into bad grammar, her corny pronunciation that reeked of rural roots?
As an adult, I’m drawn to tales of women who never had a voice, who were exploited, abused, misrepresented or overshadowed by men. Telling Theodora’s story—another victim of early poverty and child abuse—has taken years of work. If I can make this woman’s suffering and determination visible, it’s small compensation for not hearing what my mother couldn’t say.
Of course, I have memories that aren’t painful. Before the demons she’d been running from caught up with her, Mother created a happy, loving home. I remember paddling joyfully in the shallow Gulf of Mexico waters when I was a toddler. I remember the identical mother-daughter outfits we wore when I was a little girl. There was my big birthday party—complete with a pony—when I was five.
Then there were the shopping expeditions at the fanciest stores when I was a teenager. Mother bought me dozens of pairs of shoes and more dresses than I could possibly wear. I didn’t know—but she couldn’t forget—the homemade, patched dresses she’d worn, made from a flour sack. And her dusty feet stained red from working barefoot in the field.
Mostly I remember snuggling in her arms and the back-and-forth motion of the big rocking chair. To lull me to sleep she sang this song: “See the train go ‘round the bend, good-bye, my lover, good-bye. Loaded down with boys and girls, good-bye my lover, good-bye”. It ended, “Bye-bye, my baby, baby-o. What makes you cry so, my baby, baby-o”?
When I sang the song to my own baby daughters decades later, I couldn’t bear the final sentiment to be farewell. I added the words, “I’ll see you again some day”.
The Eagle and the Swan