I hear their horses’ hoofs!
Yonder I see them! Come, sweet caramillo,
This serenade shall be the Gypsy’s last!
(Fires down the pass.)
Ha! ha! Well whistled, my sweet caramillo!
Well whistled! — I have missed her! — O my God!
(The shot is returned. BARTOLOMÉ falls.)    1820

 

EVANGELINE: A TALE OF ACADIE

 

 

This epic poem was first published in 1847 and was the poet’s most famous work in his lifetime.  It concerns an Acadian girl named Evangeline and her search for her lost love Gabriel.  Evangeline is set during the time of the Expulsion of the Acadians - the forced removal by the British of the Acadian people from the present day Canadian Maritime provinces and also parts of the US state of Maine.  Longfellow was inspired by his friend and fellow author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who introduced him to the true story of the Acadians in Nova Scotia.  Also, Longfellow employed the use of dactylic hexameter, imitated from the Greek and Latin classical works he admired so much. The poem is renowned for its successful defining of Acadian history and identity in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Firstly, Evangeline narrates the betrothal of the fictional Acadian girl to her beloved, Gabriel Lajeunesse, and their separation as the British deport the Acadians from Acadie in the Great Upheaval. The poem then follows Evangeline across the landscapes of America as she spends many years in a search of Gabriel. Finally, she settles in Philadelphia and, as an old woman, works as a Sister of Mercy among the poor. Whilst tending the sick during an epidemic, she discovers Gabriel among the sick and he dies in her arms.

Contemporary reviews were very positive about the epic poem, with one reviewer for the Metropolitan writing, “No one with any pretensions to poetic feeling can read its delicious portraiture of rustic scenery and of a mode of life long since defunct, without the most intense delight”. Longfellow’s friend Charles Sumner claimed to have met a woman who “has read Evangeline some twenty times and thinks it the most perfect poem in the language”. Now, Evangeline is generally considered to be the first important long poem in American literature.


The St. John River Campaign: Raid on Grimrose, New Brunswick – a contemporary depiction of the Expulsion of the Acadians


CONTENTS

 

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

EVANGELINE

 

PART THE FIRST

I

II

III

IV

V

PART THE SECOND

I

II

III

IV

V

 


Louis-Philippe Hébert’s sculpture of Evangeline in Grand-Pré National Historic Site, Nova Scotia


INTRODUCTORY NOTE

 

In Hawthorne’s American Note-Books is the following passage: —

 

“H. L. C. heard from a French Canadian a story of a young couple in Acadie. On their marriage-day all the men of the Province were summoned to assemble in the church to hear a proclamation. When assembled, they were all seized and shipped off to be distributed through New England, — among them the new bridegroom. His bride set off in search of him — wandered about New England all her life-time, and at last, when she was old, she found her bridegroom on his death-bed. The shock was so great that it killed her likewise.”

This is the story as set down by the romancer, which his friend, Rev. H. L. Conolly, had heard from a parishioner. Mr. Conolly saw in it a fine theme for a romance, but for some reason Hawthorne was disinclined to undertake it. One day the two were dining with Mr. Longfellow, and Mr. Conolly told the story again and wondered that Hawthorne did not care for it. “If you really do not want this incident for a tale,” said Mr. Longfellow to his friend, “let me have it for a poem.” Just when the conversation took place we cannot say, but the poem was begun apparently soon after the completion of the volume, The Belfry of Bruges and other Poems, and published October 30, 1847. Hawthorne, who had taken a lively interest in the poem, wrote a few days after, to say that he had read it “with more pleasure than it would be decorous to express.” Mr. Longfellow, in replying, thanked him for a friendly notice which he had written for a Salem paper, and added: “Still more do I thank you for resigning to me that legend of Acady. This success I owe entirely to you, for being willing to forego the pleasure of writing a prose tale which many people would have taken for poetry, that I might write a poem which many people take for prose.”  3

In preparing for his poem Mr. Longfellow drew upon the nearest, most accessible materials, which at that time were to be found in Haliburton’s An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, with its liberal quotations from the Abbé Raynal’s emotional account of the French settlers.