Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Revisiting Longfellow with a Memory from Zimbabwe

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I employed the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) as a kind of refrain in my novel Brookhaven. A main character is well known in his family for his lifelong love of Longfellow’s poetry and his ability to recite it from memory. 

What I didn’t realize or remember was just how long I’d been reading Longfellow’s poetry myself. That is, until a recent comment on a post at Tweetspeak Poetry popped up.

A first edition of Hiawatha

The comment first arrived as an email. It’s a standard notification that Tweetspeak writers get when someone comments on a post they’ve written. I read it and looked at the date of the post – Oct. 3, 2017, almost nine years ago. Had I actually resumed reading Longfellow that long ago?

The post in question was about Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha. And the reason I’d read and written about it was an interview with two poets, one of whom had made a comment about the poem, calling it “racially insensitive.”

I decided to read the poem myself. And I learned that the poet who’d made the remark probably hadn’t read the poem, or much of it. It is not racially insensitive. In fact, the epic poem was one of the first, if not the first, to feature a Native American as the hero. In 1855, no one, and I mean no one, considered Native Americans as heroes, in literature or anywhere else. Longfellow was even criticized for doing this by literary critics.

The comment, arriving nine years after the post was published, took me in another direction. A woman briefly described reading the poem with her class in the first year of high school. And she lived in Zimbabwe. It is the first year of high school; the class was twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. She wrote that she never forgot the story that the poem told. And the post made her realize that she needed to read it aloud to her own grandchildren. 

Longfellow about 1855

And I wondered, how many American schoolchildren ever study the poem anymore, or even read it? I can remember it from my eighth grade reading class; that year, for whatever reason, reading and English grammar were two separate subjects and classes. 

I distinctly remember reading Evangeline, another spic poem by Longfellow about the expulsion of the Acadians from what is now Nova Scotia. Evangeline is part of the folklore of the region where I grew up – southern Louisiana. And it, too, did something in an American poem that hadn’t been done before – it featured a Catholic as the heroine.

And, of course, we read and memorized Longfellow’s The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, published as one of the poems in Tales of the Wayside Inn in 1863. Not entirely accurate historically, that single poem may have shaped our understanding of the American Revolution more than any other literary endeavor. 

Critics at the time might have complained, but the American public loved Longfellow’s poems, making him one of the longest best-selling authors of the 19th century. A personal favorite is The Courtship of Miles Standish, the epic poem about the Pilgrims arrival in America that Longfellow turned into a love story. For me, that long poem is a personal favorite, because my great-grandmother, Octavia Montgomery Young, and the inspiration for the character of Olivia Montgomery in Brookhaven, is a descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins. They were both real people, and both on the Mayflower, and Longfellow made their love story the crux of the great poem.

So, for both Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles Standish, I take my Longfellow rather personally. And the memory of a woman about a high school class in Zimbabwe brings it all back.

Related:

The audiobook version of The Song of Hiawatha, all free on YouTube (almost four hours of listening).

The full text of The Song of Hiawatha.

The Mythic and Heroic: The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (at Tweetspeak Poetry). 

What Happened to the Fireside Poets?

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When I first envisioned my novel Brookhaven, I focused on a family story passed down through generations, which turned out to be a legend, as in, almost entirely untrue. But two things shifted my focus. 

First, in 2022, I had the old family Bible conserved. It had seen better days; my father gave it to me wrapped in grocery store bag paper and tied with strong. My contribution had been to remove the paper and string, wrap it in acid-free paper, and store in an acid-free box. It sat on a closet shelf for years, until I brought it to a book conservator in St. Louis. He discovered something tucked in the Book of Isaiah that both my father and I had missed – a yellowed envelope containing a lock of auburn hair.

For various reasons, I believe the hair belonged to my great-grandmother Octavia. She died in 1888 at age 44. Unusual for the time, my great-grandfather Samuel never remarried. He died in 1920. And I thought to myself, “There’s a love story here.”

Second, also in 2022, we saw a movie entitled “I Heard the Bells.” It’s a snapshot of the life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) during the Civil War, including both the tragic death of his beloved wife and the near death from a war wound of his oldest son Charles. Both events contributed to Longfellow’s writing the poem that became a Christmas hymn, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” 

To continue reading, please see me post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Illustration: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride”: Creaing a National Legend 

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It’s a tossup as to whether the most famous or best-known poem in America is Clement Moore”s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (aka “Twas the Night Before Christmas”), first published in 1823, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” (1860). My money is on “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Whole generations of schoolchildren, myself included, grew up reciting the lines that begin “Listen my children, and you shall hear…” 

Both poems are no longer taught in most of America’s public schools, but I know from my grandsons’ experience that they are taught (with great gusto) in many private schools, especially those offering a classical education. “Paul Revere’s Ride” commemorates one of the significant of the beginning of the American Revolution, a horseback ride at night to warn the cities of Lexington and Concord that British troops were coming.

That ride occurred 250 years ago tomorrow.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Artwork: the illustration accompanying the poem in the January 1861 edition of The Atlantic Magazine.

It’s Take Your Poet to Work Day

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Today is Take Your Poet to Work Day at Tweetspeak Poetry, and the site has a raft of resources to help you do that. The celebration of poetry and work has been going strong for more than a decade, and I’ve been an enthusiastic participant from the get-go. I even wrote a small book, Poetry at Work, on finding poetry in all aspects of work.

When I still had an office (or a cubicle), I’d pick a poet and bring him or her to work on the designated day in July. Typically, I’d bring my longstanding favorite poet, T.S. Eliot.

Ten years ago, I was preparing to give notice of my intended retirement from work, which I did in September of 2014. I officially retired in May of 2015. It was early, but it was time. Enough said.

I did some freelance work for a time and was even called back to the company for a three-month assignment in 2018. But “work,” if you define it as something like an eight-hour-a-day job, was over in 2015. 

But I still work, mostly with my own writing. And I still bring my poet to work.

For the last three to four years, that poet has been Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (see lower right-hand corner of photo). Longfellow has accompanied me on a writing project, serving as guide, resource, break from the pace, and sometimes even reality check. I read his works in three different editions – an 1898 “complete poems” edition by Houghton Mifflin, a 1944 edition published by Illustrated Modern Library, and a 2000 edition of his poems published by Library of America. I also used Nicholas Basbanes biography, Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2020) as a resource.

As I read, researched, and wrote, Longfellow was along for the ride, so much so that, while he didn’t become a character in my story, he did become a presence and an influence on one of the principal characters. If the character recited The Courtship of Miles Standish or Poems on Slavery, I’d stand and read them aloud as well.

I was not only taking Longfellow to work, I was also putting Longfellow to work and working alongside him. I’ll have some news about the final result in some weeks, but Mr. Longfellow may be getting his due.

You don’t have to write a novel to take your poet to work. You can read a poem aloud to yourself or others. You can stick a poem on your bulletin board. You can memorize poem or recite one while you’re doing garden work. Over the years, some have gotten rather elaborate in their efforts, including doing poetry readings at work.

What I discovered was that, even simply reading a poem in the office to myself, my understanding changed because the place provided a different context. 

For resources, tips, and background on poets (including ones you can color like Longfellow), head on over to Tweetspeak Poetry and take your poet to work.

Top photograph: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in old age.