2
Sep
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Poems
Published by Jeanna

One of the lions of American poetry, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s verses have endured across centuries to become some of the best known and best loved in the English language.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, the son of wealthy parents, his father an attorney.

From childhood, Longfellow was preoccupied with words and writing, and even as a youth contributed poems and criticism to journals and periodicals.

Highly intelligent and motivated, Longfellow entered Bowdoin College at the age of fourteen, graduating at the age of eighteen. His love of poetry and language were apparent to the faculty even at this young age, and shortly after graduation and a short stint in his father’s law office, Longfellow returned to Bowdoin to teach.

Interspersing his teaching with trips to Europe that included visits to France, Spain, Italy, Germany, England, and Switzerland, Longfellow remained at Bowdoin for twenty-five years.

While teaching at Bowdoin, Longfellow married his first wife, Mary Storer Potter, who died during a miscarriage on one of the couple’s trips to Europe.

Longfellow began teaching at Harvard in 1836, where he published his first collections of poems. However, his duties to his academic career hampered his writing career. Longfellow eventually married again, to Frances Appleton, who would bear him six children before her death in a fire after eighteen years of marriage.

In 1847, Longfellow published Evangeline, a lengthy poem about the British banishment of the French from Canada. The success of Evangeline reenergized Longfellow, and in 1854, he stopped teaching to devote himself to his poetry, and in a short time published two of the poems for which he was best known for, Hiawatha and “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

The death of his wife in 1861 was a blow to Longfellow, who by this time was a great literary success, with his poems widely read and translated. He was a favorite of other writers, such as Dickens, Whitman, and Hawthorne, and a particular favorite of President Abraham Lincoln.

Although he did not publish for two years after Frances’ death, Longfellow continued to publish poetry right up until two years before his death. He died in 1882, the bard of American Literature and one of the most famous Americans of his time, his poetry read throughout the world.

Some of Longfellow’s most famous shorter poems include:

The Day is Done

The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.

I see the lights of the village
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o\'er me,
That my soul cannot resist:

A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.

Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.

Not from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.

For, like strains of martial music,
Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life\'s endless toil and endeavor;
And to-night I long for rest.

Read from some humbler poet,
Whose songs gushed from his heart,
As showers from the clouds of summer,
Or tears from the eyelids start;

Who, through long days of labor,
And nights devoid of ease,
Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.

Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer.

Then read from the treasured volume
The poem of thy choice,
And lend to the rhyme of the poet
The beauty of thy voice.

And the night shall be filled with music
And the cares that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.

Hymn to the Night

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,
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,
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,--
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.

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!

Snow-Flakes

Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.
