A few days ago, at a street party, I heard a neighbor, my senior by a few years, recite by heart two lines from Longfellow’s “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” words that he had memorized, seven or eight decades ago. The two lines go as follows: “Archly the maiden smiled, and, with eyes overrunning with laughter, / Said, in a tremulous voice, ‘Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?’”
The maiden, in this long narrative poem, was Priscilla Mullins and the man, John Alden. The latter had come to see the young woman on an errand for his friend, Miles Standish, the Captain of Plymouth. It was to recommend Standish as a husband for Priscilla, but instead the woman was smitten with John himself.
The line, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” was to become famous to great numbers of Americans now of a certain age. And Henry Wadsworth Longfellow achieved household-name status, perhaps the best known poet in the country with a reputation that still flourished when I was in elementary school.
The poem quoted above was not the best known of his works, however. “Listen my children and you shall hear / the midnight ride of Paul Revere” were words that even more schoolboys and girls in the 1930s would have known by heart. When my age peers and I were young, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ranked as our poet laureate, the almost-official celebrator of our national history.
Like many other eminent literary figures of the past, Longfellow has long since gone out of fashion. He is now regarded by critics as a writer who produced some fine poetry but one whose sentimentality and uneven literary quality limits his attractiveness in the modern era. Still, it offered me pleasure to reach down from my bookshelf an edition of his complete poems, a volume acquired by my mother long ago.
The incentive to look at Longfellow again has come from a new friend. Ivan, a faculty member at Notre Dame, has spent parts of the last two summers in Cambridge, in order to research material for a book on Longfellow. My friend, surprisingly, is a native of Patagonia, the extreme southern region of Chile, and teaches South American history.
Ivan is studying the works of Longfellow that are connected with the Spanish language. As professor of modern languages, first at his alma mater Bowdoin College, then at Harvard, Longfellow developed fluency in French, Italian, and Spanish, in addition to other languages. Most of us who became familiar with his poems long ago never realized what an accomplished teacher and scholar he was.
This renewed interest in him recently moved me to visit his house on Brattle Street in Cambridge. Though I had attended concerts on the lawn several times, I had not been inside the house for many years. Going through it, with a knowledgeable and enthusiastic park ranger as guide, proved an enjoyable experience.
Before it became Longfellow’s, the mansion was famous for housing George Washington when he first assumed command of the Continental Army. In 1835, Longfellow moved in as a boarder; he did not own the house until his marriage. The father of Fanny Appleton, his bride, gave it to him as a wedding present.
Walking through the rooms and hallways, I felt a mixture of emotions. The Victorian charm of the furnishings and the memories of another era evoked by the memorabilia touched me agreeably. But hearing again about the horrific death of Fanny, surprised by fire that caught her dress, and the way Longfellow never quite recovered from this event, created in me a renewed sadness.
We did not see the upper floor where this tragedy took place; insufficient federal funding for the Longfellow site has reduced staffing and made extended tours impossible. But the main floor is full of tangible reminders of the poet and his era. The “spreading chestnut tree” that once protected the village blacksmith survives in a wooden chair in Longfellow’s study. The chair was a gift from the children of Cambridge, and many of them came to visit him and to sit in it.
We know that Longfellow wrote charmingly about his own children, We were happy to recognize, on the dining-room walls, the portrait of the three daughters─“grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, and Edith with golden hair”─who invade his study in “The Children’s Hour.” We should also remember that this happy home was the center of considerable intellectual and literary activity. Abolitionists and transcendentalists gathered at the poet’s table, and his own work of composition and translation brought consciousness of a wider world to a young nation.
Memorizing Longfellow is not longer a staple of grade-school education, but a visit to the poet’s house helps us to realize why he was a towering figure in his own time, and why he should not be forgotten by ours.
Richard Griffin