Sky Is Filled with Stars Necklace

“The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This delicate yet modern necklace features the last line of one of Longfellow’s most famous poems, stamped on two slender pendants of 14-karat gold vermeil (each 0.25" x 1.5"). The chain is 18" long.

Longfellow wrote the poem, “Moritori Salutamas,” for the fiftieth anniversary of the Class of 1825 of Bowdoin College, his class. In October 1874, he was asked to write a poem for the event; he originally declined because he found the concept of commemoratory poems so distasteful. Ten days later, however, he noted in his diary that he had completed the poem—all 285 lines of it. Even more exceptionally, he read it at the anniversary to the audience at the church in Brunswick. He was grateful to be able to read the poem from the pulpit, commenting, “Let me cover myself as much as possible; I wish it might be entirely.”

The designer crafts her jewelry by hand in a solar-powered studio in Southern California. She casts each design from reclaimed metals in a clay mold using the ancient art of lost wax casting.