Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) is arguably the most popular poet America has ever produced, and that includes Frost, Whitman and Dickinson. During the 19th century, Longfellow and Alfred, Lord Tennyson in England dominated the world of poetry, and then in the subsequent century they fell by the wayside and languished there until recent times. They are today not entirely back in fashion, but attention is being paid and their poetry is being taught.
Which leads me to a recent discovery. With the possible exception of Shakespeare, no writer’s poems are more easily identified from just their first line than those of Longfellow. Let me show you what I mean.
Here are five opening lines. Can you identify the poems? All are by Longfellow.
A) Listen my children and you shall hear
B) Under a spreading chestnut tree
C) This is the forest primeval
D) Between the dark and the daylight
E) I shot an arrow in the air
I doubt that you came up short, but here are the complete opening stanzas.
A) Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
B) Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands,
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
C) This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic.
D) Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
That is known as the Children’s Hour.
And in full:
E) I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.
I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?
Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.
* * *
These poems have an easy melodic lilt that helps them linger in the memory. Their rhyme schemes are traditional, and if their sentiments in general lack complexity compared to modern verse, that may be why they found such a broad audience in their less-complicated heyday.
Longfellow and his New England associates, James Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell among them, became known as Fireside Poets because families often gathered around the fireplace to read aloud about Paul Revere or Hiawatha or Miles Standish and the Pilgrims. Who among us has carried on that tradition? (Of course, we now have electric heat and television!)
* * *
The Firesiders were good story-tellers and wrote highly-spirited verse. Longfellow, however, also liked to dip into more somber emotions as long as there could be some uplift at the end. Here is “The Rainy Day.”
The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.
My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
And Longfellow had a day that was as dark as any in the lives of the poets. He and his lovely and talented wife Fanny lived and raised their family in a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts that had been George Washington’s headquarters in 1776. Theirs was a blissful existence until one afternoon in 1861 when Fanny was using molten wax to seal some locks of hair. A gust of wind through an open window spilled the wax onto her billowy crinoline dress, and she was consumed in flames, dying the following morning. Longfellow was also burned trying to save her and thereafter wore a heavy white beard in part to cover his injuries. Looking back eighteen years later he wrote this elegiac sonnet:
In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face — the face of one long dead —
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
* * *
Looking back, Longfellow was supremely well-educated. Born in Portsmouth, Maine, he graduated from Bowdoin College then went abroad, learning French, Italian and Spanish before settling for a time in Heidelberg, Germany. His language skills later served him in good stead when he made his famous translations of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and taught European languages and Belles Lettres for eighteen years at Harvard.
He had a firm command of his craft, and perhaps the word “craft” is well-chosen for one of his finest poems, “The Building of the Ship,” written in 1849. Through many stanzas, Longfellow in nuanced detail describes the selection of wood and hardware, the masts, the sails, the anchor, the sounds of hammers and mallets as the ship is put together. It climaxes in the launching:
Sail forth into the sea, O ship!
Through wind and wave, right onward steer!
The moistened eye, the trembling lip,
Are not the signs of doubt or fear.
And safe from all adversity
Upon the bosom of that sea
Thy comings and thy goings be!
But then suddenly and marvelously in an added paragraph his ship becomes a metaphor for all of America, and the poem explodes into this resounding pre-Civil War shout:
Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
President Franklin Roosevelt sent a handwritten message with these lines to Winston Churchill in the dark days of 1941.
* * *
So let’s welcome back Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A favorite poem of mine captures many of his finest qualities, especially with the optimistic advice at the finish.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
* * *
VIDEO. Our setting is the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts. Will Geer plays the role of the Innkeeper, and Cynthia Herman is Edith, his daughter. Jill Tanner and George Backman are guests staying for the night.
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
