HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
(1807–1882)
Contents
The Poetry Collections
VOICES OF THE NIGHT
JUVENILE AND EARLIER POEMS
BALLADS AND OTHER POEMS
POEMS ON SLAVERY
THE BELFRY OF BRUGES AND OTHER POEMS
BIRDS OF PASSAGE
SONGS AND SONNETS
THE SPANISH STUDENT
EVANGELINE: A TALE OF ACADIE
THE SEASIDE AND THE FIRESIDE
THE SONG OF HIAWATHA
THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH AND OTHER POEMS
TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN
FLOWER-DE-LUCE
THE MASQUE OF PANDORA AND OTHER POEMS
KÉRAMOS AND OTHER POEMS
ULTIMA THULE
IN THE HARBOR
CHRISTUS: A MYSTERY
JUDAS MACCABÆUS
MICHEL ANGELO: A FRAGMENT
FRAGMENTS
TRANSLATIONS
The Poems
LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
The Novels
HYPERION, A ROMANCE
KAVANAGH
The Travel Writing
OUTRE-MER: A PILGRIMAGE BEYOND THE SEA
The Biography
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
© Delphi Classics 2012
Version 1
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
By Delphi Classics, 2012
NOTE
When reading poetry on an eReader, it is advisable to use a small font size and landscape mode, which will allow the lines of poetry to display correctly.
The Poetry Collections
489 Congress Street, Portland, Maine — Longfellow’s birthplace; now known as ‘Wadsworth-Longfellow House’, a world famous literary museum
Longfellow’s birthplace in 1910
The house in 1826
The poet’s father, Stephen Longfellow (June 23, 1776 - August 2, 1849), was a U.S. Representative from Maine.
VOICES OF THE NIGHT
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular writer of his day and is generally regarded as America’s most distinguished poet, whose famous works Paul Revere’s Ride, The Song of Hiawatha and Evangeline have enjoyed wide-spread popularity ever since their first appearance. Longfellow was also a keen classicist, who was the first American to translate Dante’s The Divine Comedy and other foreign language texts, encouraging a new age of American scholarship.
Initially, after completing his education at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Massachusetts, Longfellow became a professor at Bowdoin and later at Harvard College. Whilst teaching, he released his first poetry collection, Voices of the Night (1839), which contained the poems Hymn to the Night, The Psalm of Life and The Light of the Stars, achieving immediate popularity. This inspired the young poet to write a second collection, entitled Ballads and Other Poems, which appeared two years later in 1841. At this time, Longfellow wrote predominantly lyric poems, known for their musicality and often presenting stories of mythology and legend. However, he was criticised for imitating European styles and writing specifically for the masses.
After the release of Voices of the Night and Ballads and Other Poems, Edgar Allan Poe wrote in the February 1840 issue of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine that Longfellow had “idiosyncratic excellences” and a “fitful imagination.”( But Poe also complained that these were insufficient to “the ultimate achievement of any well-founded monument – any enduring reputation… Longfellow appears to us singularly deficient in all those important faculties which give artistical power, and without which never was immortality effected.” Still, Voices of the Night was instantly popular with readers and The New-Yorker announced Longfellow as “one of the very few in our time who has successfully aimed in putting poetry to its best and sweetest uses”. The Southern Literary Messenger immediately put Longfellow “among the first of our American poets”, whilst the poet John Greenleaf Whittier said that Longfellow’s poetry illustrated “the careful moulding by which art attains the graceful ease and chaste simplicity of nature”.
Longfellow, as a young man
Mary Storer Potter became Longfellow’s first wife in 1831, but she sadly died four years later after a miscarriage.
CONTENTS
Prelude
Hymn to the Night
A Psalm of Life
The Reaper and the Flowers
The Light of Stars
Footsteps of Angels
Flowers
The Beleaguered City
Midnight Mass for the Dying Year
The first edition
Prelude
The title Voices of the Night originally was used by Mr. Longfellow for the poem Footsteps of Angels; then he gave it to the first collected volume of his poetry with special application to the group of eight poems following Prelude. Here it is confined to this group.
PLEASANT it was, when woods were green
And winds were soft and low,
To lie amid some sylvan scene,
Where, the long drooping boughs between,
Shadows dark and sunlight sheen 5
Alternate come and go;
Or where the denser grove receives
No sunlight from above,
But the dark foliage interweaves
In one unbroken roof of leaves, 10
Underneath whose sloping eaves
The shadows hardly move.
Beneath some patriarchal tree
I lay upon the ground;
His hoary arms uplifted he, 15
And all the broad leaves over me
Clapped their little hands in glee,
With one continuous sound; —
A slumberous sound, a sound that brings
The feelings of a dream, 20
As of innumerable wings,
As, when a bell no longer swings,
Faint the hollow murmur rings
O’er meadow, lake, and stream.
And dreams of that which cannot die, 25
Bright visions, came to me,
As lapped in thought I used to lie,
And gaze into the summer sky,
Where the sailing clouds went by,
Like ships upon the sea; 30
Dreams that the soul of youth engage
Ere Fancy has been quelled;
Old legends of the monkish page,
Traditions of the saint and sage,
Tales that have the rime of age, 35
And chronicles of eld.
And, loving still these quaint old themes,
Even in the city’s throng
I feel the freshness of the streams,
That, crossed by shades and sunny gleams, 40
Water the green land of dreams,
The holy land of song.
Therefore, at Pentecost, which brings
The Spring, clothed like a bride,
When nestling buds unfold their wings, 45
And bishop’s-caps have golden rings,
Musing upon many things,
I sought the woodlands wide.
The green trees whispered low and mild;
It was a sound of joy! 50
They were my playmates when a child,
And rocked me in their arms so wild!
Still they looked at me and smiled,
As if I were a boy;
And ever whispered, mild and low, 55
�
��Come, be a child once more!”
And waved their long arms to and fro,
And beckoned solemnly and slow;
Oh, I could not choose but go
Into the woodlands hoar, — 60
Into the blithe and breathing air,
Into the solemn wood,
Solemn and silent everywhere!
Nature with folded hands seemed there,
Kneeling at her evening prayer! 65
Like one in prayer I stood.
Before me rose an avenue
Of tall and sombrous pines;
Abroad their fan-like branches grew,
And, where the sunshine darted through, 70
Spread a vapor soft and blue,
In long and sloping lines.
And, falling on my weary brain,
Like a fast-falling shower,
The dreams of youth came back again, — 75
Low lispings of the summer rain,
Dropping on the ripened grain,
As once upon the flower.
Visions of childhood! Stay, oh, stay!
Ye were so sweet and wild! 80
And distant voices seemed to say,
“It cannot be! They pass away!
Other themes demand thy lay;
Thou art no more a child!
“The land of Song within thee lies, 85
Watered by living springs;
The lids of Fancy’s sleepless eyes
Are gates unto that Paradise;
Holy thoughts, like stars, arise;
Its clouds are angels’ wings. 90
“Learn, that henceforth thy song shall be,
Not mountains capped with snow,
Nor forests sounding like the sea,
Nor rivers flowing ceaselessly,
Where the woodlands bend to see 95
The bending heavens below.
“There is a forest where the din
Of iron branches sounds!
A mighty river roars between,
And whosoever looks therein 100
Sees the heavens all black with sin,
Sees not its depths, nor bounds.
“Athwart the swinging branches cast,
Soft rays of sunshine pour;
Then comes the fearful wintry blast; 105
Our hopes, like withered leaves, fall fast;
Pallid lips say, ‘It is past!
We can return no more!’
“Look, then, into thine heart, and write!
Yes, into Life’s deep stream! 110
All forms of sorrow and delight,
All solemn Voices of the Night,
That can soothe thee, or affright, —
Be these henceforth thy theme.”
Hymn to the Night
Composed in the summer of 1839, “while sitting at my chamber window, on one of the balmiest nights of the year. I endeavored to reproduce the impression of the hour and scene.”
I HEARD the trailing garments of the Night
Sweep through her marble halls!
I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light
From the celestial walls!
I felt her presence, by its spell of might, 5
Stoop o’er me from above;
The calm, majestic presence of the Night,
As of the one I love.
I heard the sounds of sorrow and delight,
The manifold, soft chimes, 10
That fill the haunted chambers of the Night,
Like some old poet’s rhymes.
From the cool cisterns of the midnight air
My spirit drank repose;
The fountain of perpetual peace flows there, — 15
From those deep cisterns flows.
O holy Night! from thee I learn to bear
What man has borne before!
Thou layest thy finger on the lips of Care,
And they complain no more. 20
Peace! Peace! Orestes-like I breathe this prayer!
Descend with broad-winged flight,
The welcome, the thrice-prayed for, the most fair,
The best-beloved Night!
A Psalm of Life
What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist
Mr. Longfellow said of this poem: “I kept it some time in manuscript, unwilling to show it to any one, it being a voice from my inmost heart, at a time when I was rallying from depression.” Before it was published in the Knickerbocker Magazine, October, 1838, it was read by the poet to his college class at the close of a lecture on Goethe. Its title, though used now exclusively for this poem, was originally, in the poet’s mind, a generic one. He notes from time to time that he has written a psalm, a psalm of death, or another psalm of life. The “psalmist” is thus the poet himself. When printed in the Knickerbocker it bore as a motto the lines from Crashaw: —
Life that shall send
A challenge to its end,
And when it comes say, Welcome, friend.
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! 5
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; 10
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating 15
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife! 20
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, — act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us 25
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, 30
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, 35
Learn to labor and to wait.
The Reaper and the Flowers
In his diary, under date of December 6, 1838, Mr. Longfellow writes: “A beautiful holy morning within me. I was softly excited, I knew not why, and wrote with peace in my heart, and not without tears in my eyes, The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm of Death. I have had an idea of this kind in my mind for a long time, without finding any expression for it in words. This morning it seemed to crystallize at once, without any effort of my own.” This psalm was printed in the Knickerbocker for January, 1839, with the sub-title A Psalm of Death, and with the familiar stanza from Henry Vaughan, beginning: —
Dear beauteous death; the jewel of the just!
THERE is a Reaper, whose name is Death,
And, with his sickle keen,
He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,
And the flowers that grow between.
“Shall I have naught that is fair?” saith he; 5
“Have naught but the bearded grain?
Though the breath of these flowers is sweet to me,
I will give them all back again.”
He gazed at the flowers with tearful eyes,
He kissed their drooping leaves; 10
It was for the Lord of Paradise
He bound them in his sheaves.
“My Lord has need of these flowerets gay,”
The Reaper said, and smile
d;
“Dear tokens of the earth are they, 15
Where He was once a child.
“They shall all bloom in fields of light,
Transplanted by my care,
And saints, upon their garments white,
These sacred blossoms wear.” 20
And the mother gave, in tears and pain,
The flowers she most did love;
She knew she should find them all again
In the fields of light above.
Oh, not in cruelty, not in wrath, 25
The Reaper came that day;
‘T was an angel visited the green earth,
And took the flowers away.
The Light of Stars
“This poem was written on a beautiful summer night. The moon, a little strip of silver, was just setting behind the groves of Mount Auburn, and the planet Mars blazing in the southeast. There was a singular light in the sky.” H. W. L. It was published in the same number of the Knickerbocker as the last, where it was headed A Second Psalm of Life, and prefaced by another stanza from the same poem of Vaughan: —
It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest
After the sun’s remove.
THE NIGHT is come, but not too soon;
Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Delphi Poets Series Book 13) Page 1
