1807-1882 · American poet and professor, author of Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha
About Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), born in Portland, Maine, taught modern languages at Bowdoin College and Harvard and became the most widely read American poet of the nineteenth century. His narrative poems Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), and shorter pieces such as Paul Revere's Ride, gave Americans a stock of national legends in verse; he also translated Dante's Divine Comedy.
“That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light, The fate of a nation was riding that night; And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight, Kindled the land into flame with its heat.”
“In the hour of darkness and peril and need, The people will waken and listen to hear The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed, And the midnight message of Paul Revere.”
“As unto the bow the cord is, So unto the man is woman; Though she bends him, she obeys him, Though she draws him, yet she follows; Useless each without the other!”
The Song of Hiawatha is a book-length poem in twenty-two cantos with an Introduction, retelling legends of the Ojibway and neighbouring peoples around a single hero on the south shore of Lake Superior, which the poem calls Gitche Gumee, the shining Big-Sea-Water. The Introduction presents the songs as gathered by the singer Nawadaha from the forest, the birds and the rivers, and addresses readers who believe every human heart is human.
written 1860; published 1861 · 19th Century · Poetry
Paul Revere's Ride is a narrative ballad that tells how a Boston silversmith carried the alarm of a British march into the Massachusetts countryside on the night of 18 April 1775. It opens like a story told aloud, Listen, my children, and notes that hardly anyone still alive remembers the day.