Few poets, then or now, in fact, can match Longfellow’s easy and skillful management of craft. And if that in itself has not endeared Longfellow to most poets of the twentieth century, it should be noted that at least one of the major twentieth-century American poets, Robert Frost, counted Longfellow among his favorite poets, became expert himself in short lyrics and long narratives in something like the Longfellow fashion, and even took the title of his first book, A Boy’s Will, from a Longfellow poem, “My Lost Youth”: “A boy’s will is the wind’s will,/And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.” Of course, Frost is no moralizer in the Longfellow manner—he and his generation could no sooner embrace the openly moral than Longfellow’s could avoid it. But even with the moralizing characteristics that separate Longfellow from the current age, it will be difficult for new readers not on occasion to feel Longfellow’s peculiar power to captivate and enchant. In the end, Longfellow wrote many lyrics, ballads, and portions (at least) of longer narratives that we are simply happy to have as part of our poetic memory and national literature. It is, indeed, one of life’s small literary pleasures to be once again in the company of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The list of still-famous Longfellow shorter poems is impressive: “A Psalm of Life,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “Mezzo Cammin,” “The Village Blacksmith,” “My Lost Youth,” “The Children’s Hour,” “Aftermath,” “In the Churchyard at Cambridge,” (the slightly longer) “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and many others. The oldest readers of Longfellow today will no doubt remember some of these from their own school days, when memorizing poems was part of the regular English curriculum. Lines like these from “A Psalm of Life” will charm them by recalling not merely their own childhoods, but also an age that valued poetry as the natural vehicle for uplifting and inspirational messages—what they may still think of as “real” poetry:

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.

These lines toward the end are among the most famous in nineteenth-century American literature:

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time

Longfellow’s formula may be too simple, and his results too naively and comfortably predictable, but even so, it is hard to resist the secure and unchaotic world of such an ample and competent poet. One need not abandon his own world to enjoy visiting Longfellow in his.

As orderly and popular and satisfying as the best of Longfellow’s shorter poems are, it is perhaps in the longer poems that he made his most indelible mark: Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles Standish. Each has peaks and valleys where one’s interest is likely to spike and flag, but an artist is judged by his best work, not his worst, and like all great artists, especially the ambitious ones eager to make big statements, Longfellow does reach some heights in these three showcase pieces that have earned a lasting place in America’s literature.

The story of Evangeline was suggested to Longfellow by Nathaniel Hawthorne, his friend and classmate at Bowdoin College in the 1820s, who thought Longfellow might make better use of the story than he could. It is the moving story of Evangeline and Gabriel, the young man she was to marry, who are separated from each other when the British military evicted the French Acadians from their homeland in Nova Scotia during the French and Indian War and forced them onto boats for relocation out of Canada. Evangeline is not only beautiful, a vision of “celestial brightness” and “the pride of the village,” but in the course of the poem she also becomes a nunlike symbol of celibate constancy, a woman searching her whole life for the man she pledged to love when she was seventeen. After a lifetime of searching, Evangeline finds Gabriel on his death-bed, with time left only for an unspoken repledging of their love: “Vainly he strove to rise; and Evangeline, kneeling beside him,/Kissed his dying lips, and laid his head on her bosom.” Their lives had been torn apart and the new ones they received in return had been hard and lonely, but that last dying kiss made all the difference:

All was ended now, the hope, and the fear, and the
sorrow,
All the aching of heart, the restless, unsatisfied longing,
All the dull, deep pain, and constant anguish of
patience!
And, as she pressed once more the lifeless head to
her bosom,
Meekly she bowed her own, and murmured, “Father, I
thank thee!”

Evangeline the poem is an idealized poetic vision of womanhood and a carefully crafted musical composition, and if Evangeline the character emerges more like a symbol than a real woman, it will no doubt come as a surprise to discover how painfully compelling her story is.

In The Song of Hiawatha, Longfellow tells another idealized and sentimentalized story, but this time at greater length and detail about the lifestyle and legends of the American Indian. In this way, Longfellow contributed to the preservation of Native American myths and legends, becoming in the process a sort of sympathetic folklorist who saw more in the Indian and his culture than the by-then already tired image of the Noble Savage. One does well, of course, to stand a little apart from Longfellow as a recorder of Native American mythology, for it is hard to think that he would not surrender authenticity for harmony and melody, but even with that as a necessary caution, the poem is clearly ambitious and praiseworthy. Published in 1855, the same year Walt Whitman published his own faux epic, “Song of Myself,” Longfellow based his story and the way he told it on source materials that he molded into an epiclike poem in which there are Herculean tasks to be performed, a descent into the underworld to be survived, and a sense that these stories had to be preserved, which is the subject of the chapter called “Picture-Writing.” Nothing less than the preservation of a civilization was at stake, and Longfellow meant for his long work to provide a humanizing introduction to the myths and stories. It was noble work that delighted and instructed several generations of readers; it may be somewhat beside the point to wonder if anyone noticed that it was not consistently satisfying poetry.

Perhaps the story of Longfellow’s that captures the hearts of readers today, even more than those of the wandering Evangeline or the mighty Hiawatha, is the smaller courtship story that seems mistitled as The Courtship of Miles Standish. This is the story of Pilgrims John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, whom Longfellow coyly and musically calls “the Puritan maiden Priscilla.” Longfellow was descended on his mother’s side from these two Mayflower Pilgrims, and he tells their story with warmth and good humor, letting it become at moments an almost comic tale of star-crossed lovers who long for each other but are at least temporarily put at the mercy of John’s friendship for the older soldier and statesman Miles Standish, who has set his eye on the Puritan maiden as well. When Standish asks Alden to present his case to Priscilla for him, John does so, but with great inner turmoil:

All around him was calm, but within him commotion
and conflict,
Love contending with friendship, and self with each
generous impulse.
To and fro in his breast his thoughts were heaving
and dashing,
As in a foundering ship, with every roll of the vessel,
Washes the bitter sea, the merciless surge of the ocean!

John Alden, of course, dutifully presents the case of Miles Standish to Priscilla, who is disappointed, but not crestfallen—or speechless. In fact, Longfellow gives her words that have (once again) crept into the national vocabulary:

Archly the maiden smiled, and, with eyes overrunning
with laughter,
Said, in a tremulous voice, “Why don’t you speak for
yourself, John?”

As is the case with Evangeline, Priscilla is the centerpiece of her story—strong and determined, but unlike the love story of the wandering Evangeline, who seems the embodiment of bad karma, Priscilla takes matters into her own hands and stands up for herself and fights for the man she chooses rather than the man who has chosen her. Even Henry Wadsworth Longfellow can have an eerily modern moment here and there.

—Edward M. Cifelli, Ph.D.

INTRODUCTION

I

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most fashionable American poet of his day. His day was a long one, for it began in the mid-1840s and shone beyond his death into the twilight of the 1890s. Several of his poems had become popular schoolbook favorites, and it was an ignorant child indeed who had not learned by heart the resounding stanzas of “The Village Blacksmith.” By 1900 his poems had yet to pay the full price for being so popular for over fifty years. They were admired by the new and extremely fashionable author of Barrack-Room Ballads, the Anglo-East Indian Rudyard Kipling. Suddenly in 1912 his verse was read as “old” poetry, while the poems freshly printed in Harriet Monroe’s little magazine, Poetry (Chicago), represented the “new.” At that moment, now over fifty years ago, a book of Longfellow’s poems was clearly associated with an unfashionable American past: the book seemed not unlike the sight of nineteenth-century bonnets, shawls, frock coats, and age-yellowed wedding dresses hanging in the attic. In the present midcentury, if any dusty attic store-rooms still exist (rooms of a kind where one discovers a gilt-edged Longfellow’s Poems wrapped in a Spanish shawl), they are very rare.

Today, another aspect of Longfellow’s poetry is in the making. This is because it is neither in nor out of fashion. At its best—and sometimes at its worst—its music retains the power to command the ear. Often enough its imagery holds the charms of recollected childhoods in the sun.