Evangeline and Selected Tales and Poems pdf Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Free Download

The life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82) was a mixture of triumph and tragedy, fulfillment and disappointment. His youthful ambitions were all literary, but to please his father, he became a teacher. During the eight years he taught modern languages at Bowdoin College and the eighteen years he lectured at Harvard, he published thirteen books, including Evangeline (1847), the polemic Poems on Slavery (1842), and The Golden Legend (1851). Longfellow’s work was acclaimed throughout America and Europe. Two years after his death, a bust of Longfellow was unveiled in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Edward M. Cifelli, Ph.D., has taught British and American literature for more than thirty-five years and is the author or editor of seven books, including biographies of poets David Humphreys and John Ciardi. A regular essayist on poetry for several magazines, he is currently at work on a book about Arkansas poet Miller Williams.

Horace Gregory (1898-1982) was an American poet most noted for his dramatic structure and penetrating insights into the harshness of contemporary life. Among his volumes are Chelsea Rooming House (1930), Poems, 1930-40 (1941), and Another Look (1976). He also made translations of the poems of Catullus and of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

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THIS EDITION OF LONGFELLOW IS
INSCRIBED TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER,
ANNA CATHERINE GREGORY,
WHOSE READINGS OF HIS VOICES OF THE NIGHT
ARE AMONG THE CHARMS OF MY EARLIEST MEMORIES.

PREFACE

Longfellow in the Twenty-First Century

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.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Ballads and Other Poems (1842)

Yes, it was Longfellow who first said, “Into each life some rain must fall.” He had learned firsthand about pain and tragic loss when his wife suffered a miscarriage in 1835, and died of an infection shortly afterward. He wrote “The Rainy Day” some five years later, but its message, “Be still, sad heart!” would be put to an even harder test in 1861, when his second wife caught fire in a household accident and died suddenly. An ecumenical Unitarian, Longfellow did not put his grief in terms of standard Christian consolation, but instead took a humanistic tone to help himself, and everyone else in pain, to work through the “dark and dreary” days of their “common fate.” It is a tightly structured poem filled with an inner strength of purpose—just the type that would become unmistakably Longfellow’s as the years passed. Moreover, this sort of poem, the kind with a gentle, consoling tone and a warm uplifting theme, all wrapped in a tightly rhymed and metered verse, was enormously popular in the nineteenth century and goes a long way toward explaining Longfellow’s unequalled contemporary popularity.

But it also accounts for his twentieth-century eclipse. Modern readers have been drawn more and more to the tales and poems of Longfellow’s contemporary Edgar Allan Poe, partly because they can relate, far better than people of Poe and Longfellow’s time could, to Poe’s themes of mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse, as well as his persistent interest in the darker side of human nature. At the same time, modern readers gradually came to recoil from Longfellow’s wholesomeness, piety, and nationalism, which, it should be remembered, were a perfect match for the muscularly expansive mood of Manifest Destiny, America’s up-beat, nationalistic, boundary-expanding slogan of the 1840s. Poe’s personality quirks and his bad-boy psychological profile have made him irresistible to modern-day Freudians, while Longfellow’s reputation as the Goody Two-shoes of nineteenth-century American poetry, the man who brought poetry to the masses and became rich and famous doing it, has wearied and bored contemporary sophisticates, who clearly prefer their artists edgy, underappreciated, and stereotypi cally poor.

With the two hundredth anniversary of Longfellow’s birth approaching in 2007, however, the time is right once again to reread his poems and challenge the now-tired attitudes that have kept Longfellow from finding a new audience. And it is also a perfect time for this revised edition of Longfellow’s poems, so ably selected, edited, and introduced forty years ago by the mid-twentieth-century poet Horace Gregory and backed up by the likes of Norman Holmes Pearson, Van Wyck Brooks, and Lewis Carroll.1 Perhaps the time is even better now than it was then for a Longfellow resurgence, partly because the narrative poem has reemerged as a poetic form to be reckoned with—and partly because twenty-first-century readers are not as automatically dis missive of Longfellow as their immediate predecessors were. There is a new curiosity about the Longfellow phenomenon. What was there about this man and his work that made his seventieth birthday in 1877 something akin to a national holiday? Is it possible to account for Longfellow’s impressive sales, as for example the fact that on its first day in London bookstores The Courtship of Miles Standish sold ten thousand copies? And twenty-five thousand copies in the first two months in the United States?2 They want to know how it is that Longfellow is the only American poet to have had his bust put up in the Poets’ Corner in London’s famed Westminster Abbey. And new readers also want to know how it is that Longfellow, not Walt Whitman, seemed to the nineteenth century the poetic embodiment of democratic America. The twentieth century would reverse the judgment, but newcomers to Longfellow today are ready to discover for themselves how completely Longfellow spoke to his own time and place and countrymen.

Which does not mean Longfellow will ever again play as well as he did back then. Modern readers are not likely, for example, to warm very much to his quaint long-windedness, picturesque nostalgia, or fondness for moralizing. Nor will they ever enjoy plodding through some of the ponderous sections of Hiawatha and the other long poems. They will, however, recognize and admire Longfellow’s expert handling of short lyrics as well as his management of longer dramatic sequences, both of which he continues rightly to be well known for.

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