February 28 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It is unlikely that the occasion will be observed with the same pomp as Longfellow’s 70th birthday, which was an occasion for national festivities. The man who was once America’s most popular poet has fallen on hard times. Today, his work is dismissed as sentimental, preachy, banal –- or all three.
The critics have a point. Undeniably, Longfellow is as sentimental as “The Children’s Hour”, as preachy as “A Psalm of Life”, and as banal as “The Village Blacksmith” or “I shot an arrow in the air.”
Indeed, he is worse, as a glance at these two stanzas from his poem, “Excelsior” will attest:
The shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!
Oh stay," the maiden said, "and rest
Thy weary head upon this breast!"
A tear stood in his bright blue eye,
But still he answered, with a sigh,
Excelsior!
Believe it or not, that poem was set to music, and became parlor recital favorite.
Yet there is more to Longfellow than the aforementioned poems, or even such familiar works as “Hiawatha”, “Evangeline”, or “The Courtship of Miles Standish.”
Longfellow was an intellectual giant. He was a scholar and a linguist who was a professor of modern languages at Harvard. (Among his other languages, he was proficient enough in Italian to translate the whole of Dante’s Divine Comedy into English.) He was one of the first American writers to celebrate American history and landscape, and to draw inspiration from the culture of Native Americans.
He was also our first poet to become an international celebrity –- honored with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities, and by a bust in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. He was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Spanish Academy. The elementary school I attended as a child was named after him.
So what, then, shall we make of Longfellow? He was perhaps not a great poet, but he was often a good one. My own favorite poem of Longfellow’s is not one of his most popular, but it’s not a bad touchstone with which to gauge his poetic gifts. It’s a romantic portrait of an old Dutch sea captain. Read it with an open mind, and then decide if Longfellow is a poet or not.
A DUTCH PICTURE
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Simon Danz has come home again,
From cruising about with his buccaneers;
He has singed the beard of the king of Spain,
And carried away the Dean of Jaen
And sold him in Algiers.
In his house by the Maese, with its roof of tiles,
And weathercocks flying aloft in the air,
There are silver tankards of antique styles,
Plunder of convent and castle, and piles
Of carpets rich and rare.
In his tulip-garden there by the town,
Overlooking the sluggish stream,
With his Moorish cap and dressing gown,
The old sea-captain, hale and brown,
Walks in a waking dream.
A smile in his gray mustachio lurks
Whenever he thinks of the King of Spain,
And the listed tulips look like Turks,
And the silent gardener as he works
Is changed to the Dean of Jaen.
The windmills on the outermost
Verge of the landscape in the haze,
To him are towers on the Spanish coast,
With whiskered sentinels at their post,
Though this is the river Maese.
But when the winter rains begin,
He sits and smokes by the blazing brands,
And old seafaring men come in,
Goat-bearded, gray, and with double chin
And rings upon their hands.
They sit there in the shadow and shine
Of the flickering fire of the winter night;
Figures in color and design
Like those by Rembrandt of the Rhine,
Half darkness and half light.
And they talk of ventures lost or won,
And their talk is ever the same,
While they drink the red wine of Tarragon,
From the cellars of some Spanish Don,
Or convent set on flame.
Restless at times with heavy strides
He paces his parlor to and fro;
He is like a ship that at anchor rides,
And swings with the rising and falling tides,
And tugs at her anchor-tow.
Voices mysterious far and near,
Sound of the wind and sound of the sea,
Are calling and whispering in his ear,
Simon Danz! Why stayest thou here?
Come forth and follow me!"
So he thinks he shall take to the sea again
For one more cruise with his buccaneers,
To singe the beard of the King of Spain,
And capture another Dean of Jaen
And sell him in Algiers.
