The Wreck of the Hesperus

(1841)

Storytelling emerged as one of Longfellow’s poetic strengths. Although long narrative poems such as Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha became his most popular writings for readers of his time, his first experiments in telling versified tales took the form of ballads such as this one and “The Skeleton in Armor, ” both of which appeared in Ballads and Other Poems. Romantic literary tastes reawakened interest in English and Scottish folk ballads collected by Thomas Percy and Sir Walter Scott, and Longfellow had developed a fondness for German ballads when in Europe. Such poems related stories briefly (usually beginning with an event near the plot’s climax) and dispensed with background information and descriptive detail. In “The Wreck of the Hesperus, ” the narrator says nothing about the ship’s voyage before the outbreak of the storm and leaves us to guess circumstances that might have caused the skipper to risk his child’s life by taking her on this expedition. Only three characters are mentioned, though the line “Then up and spake an old Sailò r” suggests a larger crew. In keeping with ballad tradition, Longfellow relied on dramatic dialogue to advance the plot: first, when the skipper ignores the Spanish sailor’s advice to seek shelter from the approaching gale and later when the daughter directs three parallel questions to her father about alarming sounds and sights. Although it is the skipper’s prideful decision that dooms the ship, Longfellow assigns him few words. We discover his overconfidence from the “scornful laugh” with which he rebuffs the sailor and the paternal protectiveness with which he reassures the child. After the reversal of the father’s death (“A Frozen corpse was he”), the daughter invokes her heavenly father for rescue—with no happier result. The reader learns her fate along with the fisherman who discovers the maiden’s body still lashed to the wrecked ship.

As do the singers of folk ballads and the authors of broadside verse, Longfellow took as his topic an event of current interest, a shipwreck that occurred on the Massachusetts coast only a few weeks before he wrote this poem in December 1839. He claimed that the poem came to him “not... by lines, but by stanzas” as the work of one inspiration-filled night. Seeing opportunity to cultivate an American ballad literature, he adopted the typical ballad stanza of English and Scottish tradition with quatrains composed of alternating four-stress and three-stress lines in which only the second and fourth lines typically rhymed. Rather than use simple word choices characteristic of his time, as was typical of folk ballads, Longfellow imitated some of the archaic qualities 19th-century readers would have noticed in story-songs collected from earlier periods. The poem’s musical features made it easy to remember, and “The Wreck of the Hesperus” remained popular long after Longfellow turned to less restrictive forms of narrative poetry.

Paul Revere’s Ride

(1861)

This classic of American patriotic narrative verse first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and then in Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), a collection of story poems loosely connected in the style of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Longfellow imagined a group of travelers entertaining each other with stories at an old inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, just outside Concord. The landlord tells this tale, after which a student, a Sicilian, a Spanish Jew, a theologian, a poet, and a Norwegian musician all take turns. Although many of their stories originated in Europe, “Paul Revere’s Ride” develops an incident from American history at the start of the revolution. Longfellow took poetic liberties with events of April 18 and 19, 1775, omitting William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, who also rode to “spread the alarm” about advancing British troops. He focused intently on one man, Paul Revere, a silversmith and member of the Sons of Liberty, as his representative heroic citizen. After the landlord’s invitation to the reader in the opening stanza, the poem divides into two main narrative sections: the first characterized by watchful waiting for the signal from the belfry of the Old North Church and the second dominated by urgent motion of horse and man. Quietness is associated chiefly with Revere’s friend, who watches the enemy’s movement from the church window until he discerns their strategy and displays two lanterns to signal their plan for a naval approach. Imagery in this portion of the poem focuses first on the stillness of the colonial city and its graveyard and then on Revere’s restless motions as he prepares to vault into the saddle and begin his famous ride “through every Middlesex village and farm.” Once Revere springs into action, Longfellow allows no further luxury of description but hurries the reader from town to town as Revere awakens farmers to rally at Concord. Urgent motion and intensity of purpose engage the poet’s attention rather than the full story. “You know the rest, ” Longfellow’s landlord tells his listeners; there is no need to tell about Revere’s being captured that night or details of battles. This patriot lives in the reader’s imagination as perpetually in motion. Time figures prominently in this story on several levels. First, there is the landlord’s perspective on history—the interval between the events of the revolution and memories of Longfellow’s contemporaries. Then there is the psychological disparity in sense of time between the friend’s savoring of the last moments of peace and Revere’s eagerness to jump into action. More obviously, his progress in the night ride is marked by village clocks counting off the hours between midnight and two in Medford, Lexington, and Concord. Dark imagery dominates the night scene, with the glint of the two lanterns and the spark struck out by Revere’s horse breaking the gloom as those hooves “kindled the land into flame.”

Nature

(1878)

As did many other English and American poets, Longfellow often challenged himself to work within the formal limitations of the sonnet. He composed sonnets on his personal griefs in “Mezzo Cammin” and “The Cross of Snow”; sonnets on great poetic forebears, “Chaucer, ” “Shakespeare, ” “Milton, ” and “Keats”; and sonnets relating to his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy along with others on various themes such as this treatment of “Nature.” The form required him to develop his poem in 14 lines of iambic pentameter divided by both logic and rhyme into predictable units of thought. Longfellow preferred the octave/sestet division of the Italian sonnet to the three quatrains and concluding couplet of the English sonnet, and he adhered to the Italian sonnet’s abbaabba cdecde rhyme scheme. His choice of this poetic form ruled out comprehensive treatment of so broad a theme as nature, and Longfellow made no attempt to celebrate all those beauties of the natural world he described elsewhere with great love. Instead, he approached his theme according to another convention of the sonnet: that its units of thought be used to introduce and at least partially resolve some problem, often by developing an imagistic comparison. In this case, Longfellow developed a sustained analogy by devoting the first eight lines to a domestic image of a mother preparing her sleepy child or bed, then using the sestet to show how Nature guides all of us, her children, equally gently toward the sleep of death. As in “Hymn to the Night, ” he relied heavily on personification to lend kindly human qualities to a force that might otherwise seem fearsome. Of greater interest is his representation of human nature with a perspective evidently drawn from family experience. Readers can easily envisage familiar bedtime rituals and sympathize with the weary child’s mixed feelings while being led away from daytime playthings toward other comforts to be found in bed. When the poem pivots from As at the start of the octave to So at the start of the sestet, Longfellow guides us to broader application of the sonnet’s controlling simile: We are to see ourselves as children being guided toward eternal rest and to blessings different from those to which we still cling. No real conflict or resistance arises, though Longfellow memorably sums up contending feelings in key lines: “Half willing, half reluctant to be led, ” “Nor wholly reassured and comforted, ” and “Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay.”

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