The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) is probably best known over here in the UK for his Song of Hiawatha (which I for one remember doing at school), but also in his native US for his commemorative poem about that iconic event of the American Revolution, Paul Revere’s Ride. He also composed the epic poem Evangeline, about that shameful episode in British history known as the Great Upheaval, or the Expulsion of the Acadians, during the French and Indian War of 1754-1763. This was the forced deportation by the British of thousands of the largely civilian populations from the Canadian Maritime provinces to other colonies (including Spanish Louisiana where the Acadians would become “Cajuns”, but that’s another story).
In addition to the lengthy storytelling poetry, however, there is also a short and simple poem for which Longfellow is celebrated, the inspirational A Psalm of Life. First published in 1838 in the New York magazine The Knickerbocker, it is a subtle glorification of life and its possibilities. As with Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata and Rudyard Kipling’s If, the poem is didactic in tone: an invocation to mankind to follow the right path and think positively about life.
Its subtitle is What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist, which creates some context: it is a psalm in response to a psalm. It is an objection to the idea, gleaned by the narrator from listening to some biblical teaching, that this human life is not important; that we are made of dust and will eventually return to dust. No! he says – life is real, it’s serious, and this is not a drill…your body may return to dust but you have a soul so don’t squander your time here by worrying about death. As the seventh stanza says, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time…
I can’t do other than endorse that thought! Now, read on…
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
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;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
