LONGFELLOW Papers Presented at the Longfellow Commemorative Conference April 1-3, 1982

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Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Dr. Allaback has published a number of articles on Longfellow in the Harvard University Bulletin, the Emerson Society Quarterly, and American Literature. He has also written a book on Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which was published in 1978.

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In his preface to Longfellow Reconsidered: A Symposium, J. Chesley Mathews expressed the hope that the articles therein might lead to a reassessment of Longfellow. That was in 1969. Since then, only twelve articles have appeared on Longfellow in scholarly journals. Except as a historical personage, he is, in the eyes of most critics, very dead. Indeed, Mathews' symposium might more properly be regarded as the end rather than the beginning of a reassessment which had begun with Edward Wagenknecht's Longfellow: A Full-Length Portrait (1955) and his Mrs. Longfellow: Selected Letters and Journals of Fanny Appleton Longfellow (1956), continued with Howard Nemerov's little jewel of an anthology for the Laurel Poetry Series (Dell, 1959), Newton Arvin's Longfellow: His Life and Work (1964), Cecil B. Williams' Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1964), Wagenknecht again with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Portrait of an American Humanist (1966), and, of course, the first two volumes of Hilen's impeccably edited Letters (1966).

There has been no resurgence of interest in Longfellow. At present Paperback Books in Print lists only six Longfellow volumes: a Signet and an Airmont Evangeline, the Everyman edition of the poems, Jean Downey's edition of Kavanaugh, and children's editions of Paul Revere and Hiawatha. One may find in introductory poetry texts a selection or two from Longfellow (but often none at all), and in American literature anthologies like Bradley, Beatty, Long, and Perkins' The American Tradition in Literature—the most popular of such anthologies—there is a somewhat larger sampling of short lyrics. My own examination of college textbooks published since 1970 reveals that the poems most likely to be read are the following: "A Psalm of Life," "Hymn to the Night," "Skeleton in Armor," "Mezzo Cammin," "The Arsenal at Spring field," "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport," "My Lost Youth," the sonnets on the Divina Commedia and on Chaucer, Milton, and Keats, "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls," "Ultima Thule," and "The Cross of Snow." At least among college students and their teachers, who are practically the only audience or potential audience for poetry that exists any longer, this extremely short list is it. And so I would like, in a moment, to discuss a few of these poems as poetry—that is, as works of art which delight and instruct. If we cannot talk about Longfellow's work in such terms, then it seems to me we gather at the centennial of his death only to exhume and then to rebury him even deeper.

I fear it is true that even the poems on this list, although in print, are rarely read or studied. Other, more complicated poets get read while Longfellow gets laughed at. For years readers have been taught to regard Longfellow as an enemy of true poetry and authentic emotion, innocent of life's mysteries and complications. Howard Nemerov suggests that "a false romanticism in the present taste" is part of the problem, a "desire to indulge the spirit in pseudo-mysteries, which is embarrassed by plain statements and wants everything 'left implicit.'" [1] And George Steiner, commenting on the eroding base of referential recognition in modern literature and on its lack of affirmation, says that "one of the real problems of finding the positive note again is embarrassment. We are the culture of embarrassment. Never before have we been as blackmailed by embarrassment as now." [2] Countless twentieth century readers have found themselves embarrassed by Longfellow's simplicity, and yet, right now, in 1982, if I wished to encourage my students to read Longfellow (and writers like him, though there aren't many), it is that very simplicity—a wise, distilled, and earned simplicity—that I would want my students to honor and respect. But I would first have to teach them how to recognize it and how to respond to it, which seems a sorry state of affairs—though few of us who have a professional interest in literature are really, I suspect, all that good discussing simplicity, perhaps because it embarrasses us.

At his best Longfellow is a wise man who presents his vision straightforwardly to an audience which needs to be reminded that there are simple truths. This does not sit well with teachers and critics who make their living by demonstrating that all things are complicated and all truths problematic, even though these same teachers and critics run their own lives along quite different lines. Here is Edward Wagenknecht on the subject of Longfellow's simplicity:

He cherished the virtue of simplicity in literature and in life, and he always wanted everything said as simply as possible, but he was himself a very complex man—at once a scholar and gentle worldling, yet with something primitive and elemental about him too. Thus he found himself in a very strong position to recognize the complexities both of America and of "Americanism." It may even be that the consciousness of his complexity caused him to cherish simplicity more, as perhaps those who are devoted to complexity for its own sake need it that they may avoid the sight of their own minds naked and dress up their lack of substance in the fine feathers of words, thus bolstering themselves in their own conceit. [3]

Longfellow was himself a very complex man, says Wagenknecht; we had best not forget that.

Do you, as readers of poetry, cherish the "virtue of simplicity in literature and in life"? Do you believe in the reality of simple wisdom? Do you believe that there are absolute truths—or "relative absolutes," as the novelist John Gardner puts it in his recent ruminations on moral fiction—which are passed from generation to generation? and that a principal function of a poet is to do the passing? Hardly anyone today can rest easy with such blunt and unsophisticated questions; we know there are many other ways of talking about poetry. But the fact is that when we turn to Longfellow we must leave our sophisticated reading self behind and allow a more vulnerable and teachable reading self to come forward. And at this point I must make two, quite unprovable assertions: that we are all made up of many reading selves, and that there are times when Longfellow speaks to some of those selves as powerfully as any poet who has ever written. (In my experience, I might add, genuinely sophisticated readers—and they are rare—catholic in their interests, widely read, knowledgeable about this world, have no trouble distinguishing between their reading selves; those who do are almost always people who enjoy guarding their own taste and who need to feel in control of, rather than open to, literature.) Even if they have never read him, there are times in life when most people need the kind of truth Longfellow delivers, times when no other truth, or voice, will do. As Newton Arvin says, we need to keep poets like him "available for states of feeling that respond to their styles." [4]

Let us look at one of Longfellow's most notorious and critically maligned poems, "A Psalm of Life." Didactic, sentimental, too easily optimistic—what does this shopworn piece have that we can possibly use? That bland regularity of meter makes it difficult to take seriously the struggle against despair which is the poem's subject. Nevertheless, a significant battle is being fought in those smoothly rhyming lines: a voice claiming that life is empty and meaningless and that men are like "dumb, driven cattle" or are "forlorn and shipwrecked" is being challenged by a voice claiming not that life is a bowl of cherries but rather that strength and will and action can make a difference.

This is something most people need to hear—and often. Longfellow knew that, and most of us know it too but for various reasons hesitate to admit it. Sophisticated readers of sophisticated poetry have within them other reading selves: naked, worried, often frightened selves in need of comfort and reassurance, hope and faith. Many Longfellow poems speak to that self, or awaken or reawaken it. Much of the poetry we are taught to admire today simply ignores that less sophisticated reader in us all less sophisticated but more in need. From the beginning of his career as a poet, at least in works like "A Psalm of Life," Longfellow recognized that need.

Like a number of his poems anthologized today, "The Psalm of Life" grants that life is difficult and then shows how to overcome that difficulty: act now, forget the past remember that men before us have surmounted similar difficulties, remember that we might set an example for others. So let us work hard, have patience, be brave, and hope:

Let us, then, be up and doing,
     With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
     Learn to labor and to wait.

This is poetry for a state of feeling that does not need to be told how much more complicated life is than such straightforward exhortations suggest. The gentle reader of Victorian times, the general reader of today, professors, scholars, deconstructionists—all know that life is more complicated that this. This poetry does not speak to complication; it is not taking on the questions of those political, social, and psychological forces which, for example, might prevent people from being brave, patient, hardworking, and hopeful even if they wanted to. Its ideal audience, it seems to me, is a reader who has known or recently suffered a terrible shock—a death of a loved one, the loss of a job, something of that sort—and who now needs to be reminded of certain very basic facts of life in order to get going again. Or perhaps it is someone who has gradually become world weary and is now on the edge of a cliff. In any case, this person is not broken in half, and this poetic voice is telling him that he can build with what he has. He needs a cheerleader, an encourager; he does not need a complicator nor a sophisticator. We have all been in such a position. And when we were we didn't read Wallace Stevens or Ezra Pound for help.

But did we read Longfellow? We ought to. That's what he's for—or at least what this particular voice of his is for. But isn't this asking too much of literature? Isn't it naive? I can only reply that I agree with John Gardner's admittedly old-fashioned contention that "art is essentially and primarily moral—that is, life-giving," that critics must continually ask "who will this work of art help? what baby is it squashing?" and that "structuralists, formalists, linguistic philosophers who tell us that works of art are like trees—simply objects for perception," who "avoid on principle the humanistic questions" are mistaken and dangerous. [5]

But Longfellow is a great comforter and encourager, certainly the foremost nineteenth century American practitioner of this kind of poetry. [6] Part of the art of writing poems like "A Psalm of Life" is making sure that you identify what is wrong—name the problem—in such a way that when you encourage, your encouragement seems earned. Longfellow rarely explains, develops, or digs into the problem; he points to it or just touches it with phrases like "empty dream," "dumb, driven cattle," "a forlorn and shipwrecked brother." Such phrases seem to me very carefully chosen, placed in the poems as if placing weights lightly on a scale, not in order to balance equally the problem and the solution, because usually in a Longfellow poem there is more solution than problem, but to add just enough problem so that in fact the solution doesn't tip the scales entirely. The resolution of the problem has to seem relatively easy, but not too easy; otherwise it would clearly be false encouragement. Again: poems of this sort are for states of mind that need recovery, that are asking for help, and so what is needed is a plausible program of action that can be taken now. The problem cannot be ignored or denied, but neither can it become an alluring poetic edifice in its own right; the purpose of the poem is to remind us that we can conquer complication, not become enamoured and rendered inert by it.

That is where the rhyme and meter come in, too. The poem's easy regularity, its sing-song quality if you will, drives the verse toward resolution as if resolution is as inevitable as the rising sun. Nothing can stop this pulsing rhythm, this speeding heartbeat. The poem moves us along a road faster than we want to go:

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
     We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
     Footprints on the sands of time; . . .

Potentially complicated abstractions—the Future, the Past, the Present, and God—are treated in that one twenty-three word stanza as if they are all part of the scenery. They receive brief mention and a glance, but that driving rhythm tells us to move on and not get caught in the thickets of abstract speculation. If we are in fact to take heart in the poem's conclusion—"Let us, then, be up and doing"—we cannot stop by those woods; we dare not ask, "What does Longfellow mean by the Future? how can he so easily dismiss the Past? is the present so clearly identifiable? what is Action? and where precisely is God?" The ideal reader of this poem lacks the leisure and peace of mind these questions require; he needs immediate relief; he is seeking comfort. If we fail to recognize that poems like this are intended to comfort people who have real problems, and that its rhythm and meter happily conspire to deflect the relief-seeking mind away from troublesome and unneeded complexity, then such poems will always seem too easy and too simple—and that would be to misread them.

Another early Longfellow poem which is commonly anthologized, "Hymn to the Night," seems somewhat more personal than "A Psalm of Life," but it is also meant to give comfort. Like "Nature," "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls," and any number of others, it reminds us of certain inevitable processes in nature, certain regularly occurring events (fittingly mirrored by the regularity of the meter and rhyme) which could very easily make us feel acutely separate and apart from nature, irrelevant to its processes. Longfellow does confront that idea elsewhere—especially in "The Tide Rises the Tide Falls"—but here he doesn't rest his case on it because, obviously, he doesn't believe it. His night (and the blessed sleep which accompanies it) assuages and heals:

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.

It appeals to that part of us which knows that whatever care we bear has been borne by other men before us; just as night is cyclical, so men's cares are cyclical—in the broadest and most general sense. This is not a portrait of acute individual suffering or of that emptiness and despair that night often brings in modernist works, a night which can be only temporarily conquered by an electric lightbulb dangling from a cord. These lines, and others like them throughout Longfellow, conspire against preoccupation with the self and preoccupation with the details and intricacies of personal pain. Such renditions of pain rightly have a prominent place in our collective literary memory, but poems like "Hymn to the Night" unfortunately have lost such a place, and this is because we grossly underrate works that offer straightforward comfort.

The narrator of "Hymn to the Night" does not whine or complain. In effect, he reminds himself that his particular care is not so special after all and that the inexorable approach of night and sleep will prevent him from indulging his Care even if he should want to. The quick and almost perfunctory quality of this stanza—Night layest her "fingers on the lips of Care, / And they complain no more"—only emphasizes the comparative ease with which this perception is registered on this particular narrator. "Who," I can hear John Gardner asking, "who will this work of art help?" That reader in us who needs to be reminded that built into daily life are certain cycles which inevitably bring relief or comfort.

That is not to say, however, that the narrator of "Hymn to the Night" is complacent or completely content upon receiving that reminder. In the final stanza of the poem, he half prays, half implores:

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!

Feminine night is being flattered a bit here, too, and the narrator seems somewhat anxious and a touch impatient, as if he is pretty sure but not totally sure that she will come yet again. This ever so-slight note of doubt is typical of Longfellow: it keeps the easy resolution from being excessively and implausibly easy.

Another poem on our list of popularly anthologized pieces, "The Building of the Ship," has an even better example of this not-too-easy ease of resolution. In that stirring and important final stanza—beginning "Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! / Sail on, O Union, strong and great!"—the narrator assumes a strong and manly tone and assures all concerned that there is nothing to fear. Here are the final lines:

In spite of rock and tempest's roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sai1 on, nor fear to breast the sea!
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee,
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,
Are all with thee,—are all with thee!

The repetition of "Our hearts, our hopes" and of the phrase "are all with thee," especially the latter, keeps this from being too neat. It is not uncertainty, exactly, that we hear in these lines, but it's not utter certainty either. It is healthy hope, just what we would expect from a wise and optimistic narrator whose confidence is nevertheless not bullet-proof.

Even today, when most of us are tattered or wounded patriots at best, we respond to assurances that our nation will endure temporary threats and momentary setbacks. We need to hear such a voice from time to time (and, from our writers, we rarely do). But that voice cannot go unchallenged either. A public poet such as Longfellow has to respect common sense, and common sense tells us that rocks and gales do threaten the ship of state. But having made that clear, this same public poet steers us away from the ambiguity and complexity of those rocks and gales. "They are over there," he says, "but our way is over here. Follow me." We become less skeptical and more childlike under the leadership of this reassuring voice. Perhaps a long lost reading self is found again.

If part of my purpose here today is to suggest ways of discussing Longfellow now by acknowledging the existence of various reading selves within us who respond in turn to his various forms of wise and earned simplicity I cannot overlook what might be called his learned historical voice. Longfellow's considerable learning sits lightly, almost casually, in his work in a way uniquely his own. It never intimidates, obscures, or dazzles. When his historical or geographical imagination plays over his subject, it is as if that knowledge immediately becomes his reader's knowledge as well, as if he is imagining on behalf of his reader rather than performing in front of him. Longfellow always uses his learning in the service of his subject and to add a perspective or weight to the truths he conveys. To many readers it hardly seems learning at all, but rather, as in these stanzas from "The Arsenal at Springfield," sketchy jottings from an amateur historian's notebook:

I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus,
     The cries of agony, the endless groan,
Which, through the ages that have gone before us,
     In long reverberations reach our own.

On helm and harness rings the Saxon hammer,
     Through Cimbric forest roars the Norseman's song,
And loud, amid the universal clamor,
     O'er distant deserts sounds the Tartar gong.

I hear the Florentine, who from his palace
     Wheels out his battle-bell with dreadful din,
And Aztec priests upon their teocallis
     Beat the wild war-drums made of serpent's skin;

But what Longfellow is doing here is earning the right to the concluding stanzas of the poem, where he offers as an answer to centuries of pillage, famine, and killing the voice of Christ saying "Peace!" Again this may sound like an excessively easy, absurdly hopeful answer (after all, since 1844, when the poem was written America has been involved in seven wars). The narrator is actually suggesting—or imagining—the future possibility that Christ's message may be heeded:

Peace! and no longer from its brazed portals
     The blast of War's great organ shakes the skies!
But beautiful as songs of the immortals,
     The holy melodies of love arise.

How can this possibly be taken seriously? Is this not the most misleading kind of sentimentalism? I would argue that Longfellow has used his light-but-learned historical voice to make it unmistakably clear that he is fully aware of the universality of war and of the crimes men have committed. Yet he still ends the poem with hope and optimism. He does that because he knows, wisely, that men must have hope just as they must have food and water, and that hope can only be perceived and felt in relatively simple terms—otherwise it is not hope. We do not cling to complicated dreams of the future but to simple, clarifying ones. There is a part of us—basic, deep down, often denied by reason and analytic intelligence—that thrives on and needs absolutely the simple dreams that Christ (or someone, or something, a nuclear arms freeze perhaps?) will come again and set things right. And of course this part of us exists right next to another part which knows mankind as so darkly complicated and various that there are few solutions to anything.

In "The Arsenal at Springfield" Longfellow's narrator is, as elsewhere, a man of experience. After his sensitive imagination allows him to transform the arsenal into a huge organ, his mind fixes on a series of complicated and graphic images of historical catastrophes and human misdeeds and gives itself any number of reasons for despair and hopelessness:

The tumult of each sacked and burning village;
     The shout that every prayer for mercy drowns;
The soldiers' revels in the midst of pillage;
     The wail of famine in beleaguered towns;
The bursting shell, the gateway wrenched asunder,
     The rattling musketry, the clashing blade; . . .

And yet that same knowledgeable narrator comes out at the end offering a simple and clear answer. "If such a wise and sensitive man can feel and perceive all that darkness and still have hope," says a willing reader within us, "then I shall too." No one can persuade me that such a reader doesn't exist in all of us, and it is that reader for whom Longfellow aims.

Not all Longfellow lyrics available to us today are as obviously hopeful and comforting as those I have discussed so far. Many are about death or the rapid passage of time to that end: "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport," "Mezzo Cammin," "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls," "Nature," "The Cross of Snow," "Ultima Thule." William Dean Howells said that Longfellow's "life included in its course all the sorrow for all the tragedy that can educate a man to sympathy with other human lives." [7] Part of that sympathy took the form of poems about death or aging addressed implicitly to ordinary readers in need of instruction on this subject. Longfellow knew what people actually worried about. Phyllis Franklin has said that he "makes us poignantly aware of man in time by evoking a sharp sense of man's dilemma as he stands marooned in the present moment feeling, with some sadness, the past moving away from him and the future—as dark as the past and yet full of hope—irrevocably approaching." [8] I would say that poems like "Mezzo Cammin," "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls," "The Cross of Snow," and "Ultima Thule" speak to that reader in us who needs strong and positive examples of men facing death or aging but examples which do not glaze over those hard facts either:

Half of my life is gone, and I have let
     The years slip from me and have not fulfilled
     The aspiration of my youth, . . .

Who among us has not had that feeling? And who among us has not heard above them "on the autumnal blast / The cataract of Death far thundering from the heights?" Yes, there is certainly a sense of being "marooned" in "Mezzo Cammin," but placed directly in the middle of this fine sonnet are the pivotal lines "But sorrow, and a care that almost killed, / Kept me from what I may accomplish yet." From "what I may accomplish yet"! Despite that clear perception of the sorrow behind and of the thundering cataract ahead, there is no resignation here, no yielding to the despair of inaction. This is information we can always use. We need to know that other men, even in the face of death, still hope for more accomplishment, that is, that they do not give up; their strength gives us strength.

There are of course, among the poems on our list, several other examples of credible strength in the face of death and aging. The Jews "trampled and beaten" as the sand yet "unshaken as the continent"; the calm acceptance of the "unending endless quest" in "Ultima Thule"; the relentless avoidance of self-pity in "The Cross of Snow." Longfellow's narrators do not challenge death or fight it or regard it as a hyena at the foot of one's cot in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro, but they appear to know it as a familiar presence and to be quietly unafraid. If you believe that art instructs, as I do, such poems can help.

Some may say that there is not enough pain or detail of personal feeling in these poems for them to be authentically helpful, but I would reply that Longfellow, like Hemingway, another writer who cherished wise simplicity and the plain style, is very wary of on-the-page detailing of personal emotion. In that tantalizingly general poem, "My Lost Youth," at the moment when the narrator seems about to reveal himself, he says, "There are things of which I may not speak," a line which, in my opinion, manifests one of Longfellow's first principles. Much does go unnamed and unspoken in his shorter lyrics, but true emotion is nevertheless there, looming up beyond the page, waiting for us to appropriate it. Longfellow always regarded himself as a public poet, not as a poet displaying his private emotion. He continually refrains from mapping out the details of his most personal feelings not only because he feels it indelicate and conceited to do so but also because he does not wish to usurp our own. His themes are universal—they are ours as well as his—and his poems invite the collaboration of reading selves whose existence we need to acknowledge once again without fear of embarrassment.

So I refuse to accept that tens of thousands of nineteenth century readers were wrong to admire Longfellow and we are right to reject him, for in doing so we reject a part of ourselves which thrives upon straightforwardness, simple wisdom, and honest expressions of unadorned emotion. His day will come again.

NOTES

¹Howard Nemerov, Longfellow (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1959), p. 22.

²From an interview in the Mississippi Review, Vol. 28 & 29 (Summer, 1981), p. 80.

³Edward Wagenknecht, "Longfellow and Howells," in Henry W. Longfellow Reconsidered: A Symposium, ed. by J. Chesley Mathews, The Emerson Society Quarterly, LVIII (1970), p. 55.

⁴Newton Arvin, Longfellow: His Life and Work (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963), p. 327.

⁵John Champlin Gardner, On Moral Fiction (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 17.

⁶Howard Nemerov, otherwise a defender of Longfellow, believes that regarding a poet's work as a repository of values for the encouragement of others is a false idea left over from the Victorians. See Nemerov, Longfellow, p. 15.

⁷Quoted in Wagenknecht, "Longfellow and Howells," Longfellow Reconsidered, p. 54.

⁸Phyllis Franklin, "The Importance of Time in Longfellow's Works," in Henry W. Longfellow Reconsidered: A Symposium, ed. by J. Chesley Mathews, The Emerson Society Quarterly, LVIII (1970), p. 14.