Poetry is one of the most subtle, supple, and sacred arts. Here is the story of one poet whose soul spoke wonders in poems.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American educator and poet, was born in 1807, the second of eight children, in Portland, Maine, which was then a part of Massachusetts. He was studious and became fluent in Latin, publishing his first poem in the Portland Gazette in 1820, at age thirteen. Henry entered Bowdoin College and graduated Phi Beta Kappa at 15.
As a senior, Longfellow wrote to his father about his own aspiration in literature: “I will not disguise it in the least…. the fact is, I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature, my whole soul burns most ardently after it, and every earthly thought centres in it…. I am almost confident in believing, that if I can ever rise in the world it must be by the exercise of my talents in the wide field of literature.”
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I can identify with such determination and passionate confidence. Growing up, I discovered who I was through diaries and journals. Still, as an adult woman I was not as fee as Longfellow. I wanted a family, plus a bit of writerly status. I became a thief of time, fitting writing into the rest of my life, personal and professional as an Episcopal priest.
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In 1829, Longfellow turned down a professorship at Bowdoin College. Imagine! He wrote to the president of Bowdoin that he was turning down the professorship because he considered the $600 salary "disproportionate to the duties required". The trustees raised his salary to $800 with an additional $100 to serve as the college’s Librarian. All of this was to him a “joyless work.” So guess what?—he married a childhood friend, Mary Storer Potter, and they settled into marital unhappiness.
By 1834, he was contacted by the president of Harvard to be contracted as professor of modern languages but stipulated he had to study abroad first. There he studied German, Finnish, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic. In October of 1835, Mary miscarried at six months and died. Longfellow sent Mary’s body to be buried in Mt Auburn Cemetery in Cmbridge and fell into a deep sadness. “All day I am weary and sad.”
Returning to Harvard in 1836, this young brooding man of thirty, lived in Cambridge at Craigie House where he rented rooms and began to publish poetry. Longfellow was well liked as a professor, though he disliked being "constantly a playmate for boys" rather than "stretching out and grappling with men's minds.” The malice of discontent took residence in his grieving midlife soul.
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I recall a similar midlife feeling when I was a young mother of four blooming children and married to a husband pursuing his own ambitions and not home enough to be a companion/partner in project life. I prayed and lamented. I experimented with extramarital flirtations. Unable to find each other, my first husband and I divorced in 1982. I journaled my way through it all.
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Longfellow married Frances (Fanny) Appleton in 1843 after a very long courtship in which he pursued her over seven years with vigor and passion. When she finally agreed he was so nervous he walked 90 minutes to her house on Beacon Hill in Boston and crossed the Boston Bridge which, as of 1906, was renamed the Longfellow Bridge. Perhaps the American version of the Florentine Bridge of Sighs.
The couple had six children. Tragedy struck in 1861. Fanny was putting locks of her children's hair into an envelope and attempting to seal it with hot sealing wax while Longfellow took a nap. Her dress suddenly caught fire, though it is unclear exactly how; burning wax or a lighted candle may have fallen onto it. Longfellow was awakened from his nap and rushed to help her, throwing a small rug over her, and trying to stifle the flames with his body. Fanny was taken to her room to recover and a doctor was called. She was in and out of consciousness throughout the night and was administered ether. She died shortly after 10:00 the next morning, July 10, after requesting a cup of coffee.
Longfellow, in trying to save her, had burned himself badly. He was unable to attend her funeral. His facial injuries led him to stop shaving, and he wore a beard from then on. That beard became his trademark. We all have scars to hide or disguise—most of them left by love.
Devastated by her death, Longfellow resorted to laudanum and ether to deal with his grief, begged not to be sent to an asylum, and noted he was “inwardly bleeding to death.” Eighteen years later he wrote a sonnet: “The Cross of Snow”:
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
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In the late 1970s into the 80s I too experienced such an overload of grief—a deluge in which I thought I would drown. My youngest sister died, my father died, my marriage died, my divorce was finalized, and my vocational aspirations in the Episcopal Church died. At the same time I suffered a bout of asthma so severe it resisted usual treatments. A pulmonologist administered medical treatment enough to help me breathe, but my lungs have never been the same. They carry the memory of all that grief.
When you banish or bury pain you also banish love. Therapy helped me retrieve my lost feelings, including anger, and saved me from drowning, or trying to live a rich full life from the neck up only! Writing, theological studies, prayer retreats, liturgy, growing children, therapy, and trying out big sins also helped round me out. In time I found a new and vital lover whom I married, and a new diocesan bishop in time ordained me deacon in 1987 and priest in1988.
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Longfellow's personality became part of his reputation, in part because he had been presented as a gentle, placid, poetic soul, an image perpetuated by his brother Samuel Longfellow who wrote an early biography which specifically emphasized these points. James Russell Lowell said, Longfellow had an "absolute sweetness, simplicity, and modesty.” At his funeral Ralph Waldo Emerson called him “a sweet and beautiful soul.’ His real life, however, was more difficult than people assumed, or than he let on. He had neuralgia, chronic pain and poor eyesight, and much bereavement over the death of his wives and later a daughter. He was quiet, reserved, private, and more introverted. He found his energy and emotions through his poetry. In later years he became unsocial and avoided leaving home, dying at 75.
When you banish pain you banish love.
Longfellow remained popular with children, who adored him. He wrote a poem about the village blacksmith under the spreading chestnut tree. When that tree was cut down, the children of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had it converted into an armchair they presented to him. I still hold dear this phrase in his poem “The Children’s Hour.” I begged my mother to read it nightly. It made me feel important.
Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day's occupations,
That is known as the Children's Hour.
After Longfellow’s death, his bust was placed in Westminster Abbey in London, the only American so honored. He was also honored with a commemorative stamp issued by the US Postal Service. All this, yet his popularity declined quickly after his death in 1882 as academics shifted their attention to other poets like Frost and Whitman. The twentieth century literary scholar Kermit Vanderbilt noted, "Increasingly rare is the scholar who braves ridicule to justify the art of Longfellow's popular rhymings.”
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Such scholarly snobbery angers me. I tend to write it off as the jealousy of lesser, maybe would-be, poets and those who refuse to acknowledge the joy of children who live their live in rhyme. Why do we all remember nursery rhymes so well? I remember memorizing some of Longfellow’s work, as does my youngest son John, now fifty-one, who recently told me that when he struggled in school with learning problems, bullying, and later with colitis, he would every day read to himself before he went to bed Longfellow’s poem of 1844. I wept.
“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.
For, like strains of martial music,
Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life's endless toil and endeavor;
And tonight 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.
Longfellow captured hearts and soothed souls, even if his poetry wasn’t gushing with subjectivity or bulging with the latest innovations. It was enough for me to cross over the Longfellow Bridge in Cambridge regularly. That bridge always meant we were nearing home.
As I age, I feel, with Longfellow, that “sadness of longing not akin to pain”—the deep sigh of homing. That’s what the gentle flow of a poem’s soul can do for my own soul.
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There are reasons why gospel writers remember Jesus’s affection and wonder at children—the chief exemplars and purveyors of the heavenly kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
