Poetry Section
National Poetry Month Celebration-Book Six
A Vocation or an Avocation, That is the Question!
Quote: A literary life, to one who has the means of support, must be very pleasant. But there is not wealth enough in this country to afford encouragement and patronage to merely literary men. And as you have not had the fortune (I will not say whether good or ill) to be born rich, you must adopt a profession which will afford you subsistence as well as reputation-Stephen Longfellow.
Portland Academy
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow attended Portland Academy starting at six years of age. This Academy, which received its charter from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1794 occupied a new brick building on Congress Street, a short distance from the Longfellow home.
While the boy was pursuing his regular studies at school, he found interest in reading other books than those required in his school course, which included English classics contained in his fathers library.
In 1821 when his courses at the Academy had ended, he took the entrance examinations for Bowdoin College In New Brunswick and began classes in 1822.
Bowdoin College
Perhaps because of the success of his study at Bowdoin, association with those whose tastes agreed with his own, which included Hawthorne, his confidence in his ability to write for publication continued his contributions to the Gazette and the Portland periodical and in 1823 a series of seventeen poems he had written were published in The United States Literary Gazette.
Henry wrote to his father in 1824 expressing a desire to continue a vocation in literature, but wanting his fathers approval. The opening quote is his fathers reply, which would not be totally different today, in which pursuits of the heart and mind do not necessarily provide us with means to a comfortable life style.
The events which transpired after an exchange of letters between father and son serve as both a hope and an inspiration.
He graduated in 1825 and soon after was offered the professorship of modern languages at his alma mater. In 1826 he went to Europe to master the necessary languages.
During his second year abroad, Henry received word from his father that Bowdoin College had withdrawn the offer of the professorship. The reserve strength and the young man's character, are made plain in a reply to his father.
"...It is no sinecure: and if my services are an equivalent for my salary, there is no favor done me: if they be not, I do not desire the situation."
in 1829 he returned from abroad and assumed the professorship and the librarianship of the College.
Continuing Education
In 1831 Henry married Mary Stoner Potter of Portland and not long before publication of various prose articles to the North American Review in 1835 he received an offer of the Smith professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard University. To further his study he and his wife set sail for Hamburg in June, 1835. They stayed for a short time in London, where they met Carlyle, traveled to Stockholm and Copenhagen, where the summer passed in learning the Swedish and Danish languages, and in October reached Amsterdam. Here Mrs. Longfellow fell ill, and while she was recovering her husband undertook the study of Dutch. In Rotterdam Mrs. Longfellow again became ill, and died in that city on October 29. The loss was so great that he could neither speak nor write of it. However, he disciplined himself to work and spend several months at Heidelberg, gaining a fuller knowledge of the German language and Literature. In this city he met for the first time the poet Bryant. After traveling in Switzerland he returned to America late in 1836.
At the close of the same year he established himself at Cambridge, and there began a career which established himself at Harvard University.
Later Life
After his marriage to Frances Appleton in July, 1843 a growing list of literary projects came to fill more and more the poets thought and he began to feel increasingly hampered by the work of his college classes, so in 1854, he resigned his professorship, following were his most profitable years and his three greatest works, Evangeline, Hiawatha and The Courtship of Miles Standish. But this period of comparative ease and quiet was brought to an abrupt close by the tragic death of Mrs. Longfellow in 1861.
The poet's grief and feeling of loss were inexpressible, yet he maintained an appearance of calm. After a long time he became able to resume his work and in the years that remained to him, he produced, besides minor writings, the two series of The Tales of a Wayside Inn. But he never ceased to miss his wife. He found consolation in caring for his children, sharing alike their pleasures and their more serious interested. Then too, he had several intimate friends whose affection was always a source of great joy to him. With the exception of a fourth trip to Europe, he passed the rest of his life quietly, giving to the world the fruits of his matured poetic powers, continually extending kindly encouragement to struggling writers, and dispending charity. So fully were all the promises of his youth realized in his character and his intellectual life during this final period, that when death came in 1882, after a brief period of illness, the people of his own land and those of many other nations as well felt that a great and good man had passed from earth.
For Children Everywhere
Anyone who reads the journal and the letters in which the home life of Longfellow is plainly pictured is impressed perhaps even more than by this poems with the fitness of his title, The Children's Poet. To his loving interest children everywhere responded on the poet's seventy-second birthday, about seven hundred children of Cambridge gave him an armchair made of the chestnut-tree celebrated in The Village Blacksmith. A poem was written in answer to the gift, and a copy of this was given to every child who came to visit the poet and sit in his chair.
From My Arm-Chair, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Am I a king, that I should call my own
This splendid ebon throne?
Or by what reason, or what right divine,
Can I proclaim it mine?
Only, perhaps, by right divine of song
It may to me belong;
Only because the spreading chestnut tree
Of old was sung by me.
Well I remember it in all its prime,
When in the summer-time
The affluent foliage of its branches made
A cavern of cool shade.
There by the blacksmith's forge beside the street
Its blossoms white and sweet
Enticed the bees, until it seemed alive,
And murmured like a hive.
And when the winds of autumn, with a shout,
Tossed its great arms about,
The shining chestnuts, bursting from the sheath,
Dropped to the ground beneath.
And now some fragments of its branches bare,
Shaped as a stately chair,
Have by my hearthstone found a home at last,
And whisper of the Past.
The Danish king could not in all his pride
Repel the ocean tide,
But seated in this chair, I can in rhyme
Roll back the tide of Time.
I see again, as one in vision sees,
The blossoms and the bees,
And hear the children's voices shout and call,
And the brown chestnuts fall.
I see the smithy with its fires aglow,
I hear the bellows blow,
And the shrill hammers on the anvil beat
The iron white with heat!
And thus, dear children, have ye made for me
This day a jubilee,
And to my more than threescore years and ten
Brought back my youth again.
The heart hath its own memory, like the mind,
And in it are enshrined
The precious keepsakes, into which are wrought
The giver's loving thought.
Only your love and your remembrance could
Give life to this dead wood,
And make these branches, leafless now so long,
Blossom again in song.