Today’s Poem: A Summer Day by the Sea

At the end of a day-long season, Longfellow looks back

Albert Edelfelt, Seashore in the Evening, c. 1895 (Wikimedia Commons)

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A Summer Day by the Sea

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The sun is set; and in his latest beams
Yon little cloud of ashen gray and gold,
Slowly upon the amber air unrolled,
The falling mantle of the Prophet seems.
From the dim headlands many a lighthouse gleams,
The street-lamps of the ocean; and behold,
O'erhead the banners of the night unfold;
The day hath passed into the land of dreams.
O summer day beside the joyous sea!
O summer day so wonderful and white,
So full of gladness and so full of pain!
Forever and forever shalt thou be
To some the gravestone of a dead delight,
To some the landmark of a new domain.

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On Labor Day, not officially but really the last day of summer here in America, we bring you again that giant of 19th-century American poetry and life, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882). Like “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls,” which appeared here on the poet’s birthday at the end of February, “A Summer Day by the Sea” is late Longfellow, composed and published in 1874. Though it predates that valedictory poem by six years, this strictly observed Petrarchan sonnet — iambic pentameter, rhyme scheme of abbaabbacdecde — is a poem about the end of things. But to paraphrase the last line of Eliot’s “East Coker,” in our end is some beginning, though it may not be ours.

The sun is setting on the summer day. The cloud that suggests Elijah’s mantle, dropped on his assumption into heaven, is gray but edged with gold, introducing a simultaneity of darkness and light, ending and beginning, sorrow and joy, that is the poem’s central concern. The mantle falls, marking an end. If we know the allusion, we know that Elisha will pick the mantle up, claim it, and go forward into his own story.

But this poem dwells on the cusp of day and night. It looks back, not forward. Though lights shine out distantly in the gathering darkness, the poem’s speaker chooses to linger in the remembered brilliance of the day by the sea, even if the brightness is full of pain as well as beauty. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1868 (Wikimedia Commons)

Both these sea-poems of Longfellow’s, “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls” as well as Today’s Poem, recall his contemporary Tennyson’s much earlier “Break, Break, Break,” with its lament that the “tender grace of a day that is dead / Will never come back to me!” Yet although the closing line of “A Summer Day by the Sea” looks back — to line 4 and that dropped mantle of Elijah — it looks forward, as if it almost discerned an Elisha on the horizon, on his way to claim his “new domain.” 

The poem seems fitting for this day when Americans bid farewell to the summer and set our faces toward the autumn. Even if we can’t yet feel it in the air, even if we look back in longing to brilliant days that have slipped by so quickly, still we sense, in happiness or trepidation or some of both, the season’s turn to something yet unlived. 

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