The Song of Hiawatha

Summary

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. In the first canto Gitche Manito, the Master of Life, calls the warring nations together, bids them wash off their war-paint and smoke the peace-pipe, and promises a Prophet who will guide them. Canto II tells how Mudjekeewis became the West Wind and how his sons became the other winds. Hiawatha is born to Wenonah, who dies after Mudjekeewis deserts her, and is raised by his grandmother Nokomis, who teaches him the stars, the birds and the beasts; he kills his first deer with a bow made by the boaster Iagoo. Grown, he travels west and fights his immortal father, who sends him home to clear the land of monsters. He fasts seven days for the good of his people and wrestles the youth Mondamin, whose buried body becomes the first corn. He wins two friends, the musician Chibiabos and the strong man Kwasind, builds a birch-bark canoe, is swallowed by the giant sturgeon Mishe-Nahma and kills it from within, and slays the magician Pearl-Feather, Megissogwon, who sends fever from the marshes. He woos Minnehaha, daughter of an old Dacotah arrow-maker, and the wedding feast includes the dancing of Pau-Puk-Keewis, the songs of Chibiabos and Iagoo's tale of the Son of the Evening Star. Minnehaha blesses the cornfields, and Hiawatha invents picture-writing so that the wisdom of the old men will not be forgotten. Evil spirits drown Chibiabos under the ice; Hiawatha mourns until the Medas cure his grief, and Chibiabos becomes ruler of the land of the dead. Pau-Puk-Keewis wrecks Hiawatha's lodge, flees through many shapes and is killed; the Puk-Wudjies kill Kwasind with a pine-cone. Two ghosts visit to warn against excessive mourning. In a terrible winter Famine and Fever enter the wigwam, and Minnehaha dies while Hiawatha searches the forest for food. Iagoo returns with stories of a winged canoe and bearded white men, and Hiawatha tells of his vision of the future. In the last canto a Black-Robe priest arrives by canoe; Hiawatha welcomes him, tells his people to listen to his message, and sails westward into the sunset. Longfellow wrote the poem between June 1854 and March 1855, drawing mainly on Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's collections, and Ticknor and Fields published it on 10 November 1855.

Top Lessons

• Strength used for others

  Hiawatha fasts not for glory in war but for profit of the people, and his deeds give them corn, the canoe, healing and writing. The poem measures a hero by what he brings to his people rather than by the enemies he defeats.

• Peace among quarrelling nations

  The poem opens with Gitche Manito telling the tribes that their strength is in union and their danger in discord, and closes with Hiawatha welcoming strangers in peace. Discord, by contrast, is what his vision says will scatter his people.

• Grief and its limits

  Hiawatha mourns Chibiabos for seven weeks, and the ghosts later warn that too much lamentation burdens the dead. When Minnehaha dies, he grieves deeply yet goes on to finish his task. The poem honours mourning while showing a way through it.

• Keeping memory alive

  In Canto XIV Hiawatha sees that great men die and their wisdom perishes unless it is written. He invents signs that can be painted on grave-posts and birch-bark. The poem itself claims to preserve songs that might otherwise be lost.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The poem preserves, in a Romantic poet's retelling, several episodes that bear on the history of healing and of grief. Hiawatha's seven-day fast in Canto V, with its dizzy, swimming visions on the fourth day, reflects the vision fast of Great Lakes peoples as Schoolcraft reported it. In Canto IX the magician Pearl-Feather sends fever, pestilential vapours and poisonous exhalations from the fens, a picture that matches both native ideas of illness sent by hostile power and the miasma theory still current in Longfellow's own medicine. Canto XV is the most striking: after seven weeks of mourning, Hiawatha is brought to a Sacred Lodge by the Medas, given a drink of spearmint and yarrow, sung over and danced around, and rises healed of what the poem calls his madness and moody melancholy; the canto ends with Hiawatha teaching the use of simples, antidotes for poisons and the sacred art of healing, an allusion to the Midewiwin society of the Ojibway. Canto XIX's ghosts prescribe limits to mourning, and Canto XX gives Famine and Fever human shape as silent guests at Minnehaha's bedside, with her dying delirium of rushing falls and beckoning figures. These are literary and ethnographic materials filtered through Schoolcraft and Longfellow, not clinical records; any reading of them as accounts of depression, ritual psychotherapy or infectious disease is interpretive.

• Canto V, Hiawatha's Fasting

  Seven days of fasting with exhaustion and visions before the wrestling with Mondamin.

• Canto IX, Hiawatha and the Pearl-Feather

  Nokomis describes the magician who sends fever and poisonous exhalations from the marshes.

• Canto XV, Hiawatha's Lamentation

  Seven weeks of mourning for Chibiabos, ended by the Medas' herbal drink, chants and medicine-dance; Hiawatha then teaches simples, antidotes and the art of healing.

• Canto XIX, The Ghosts

  Two ghosts sit in silence in the wigwam and then ask the living not to burden the dead with lamentation and grave-goods.

• Canto XX, The Famine

  Famine and Fever enter the wigwam; Minnehaha's delirium and death; Hiawatha sits seven days speechless.