Today’s Poem: The Children’s Hour

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the risk of feeling

Charles-Emmanuel Serret, Portrait of a Man with His Family, c. 1888 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Children’s Hour

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
That is known as the Children’s Hour.

I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.

From my study I see in the lamplight,
Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair.

A whisper, and then a silence:
Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
To take me by surprise.

A sudden rush from the stairway,
A sudden raid from the hall!
By three doors left unguarded
They enter my castle wall!

They climb up into my turret
O’er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape, they surround me;
They seem to be everywhere.

They almost devour me with kisses,
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti,
Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old mustache as I am
Is not a match for you all!

I have you fast in my fortress,
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
In the round-tower of my heart.

And there will I keep you forever,
Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
And moulder in dust away!
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This week at Poems Ancient and Modern is bracketed — serendipitously — by poems about fatherly love. In Monday’s poem, Ben Jonson laments the brevity of a child’s life and the death of all his dearest hope; his resolution — informed by the revived Renaissance interest in classical Stoicism — is not to hold fast to what he loves, but to learn to detach himself from it. And today we have the opposite resolution, from that lion among the Fireside Poets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882).

Like Jonson, Longfellow was no stranger to helpless grief and extinguished hopes. By 1860, when Today’s Poem was written, he had lost his first wife to complications following a miscarriage. His third child with his second wife, Fanny — a historic child, her 1847 birth the first recorded birth during which the laboring woman had received ether to alleviate her pain — had died in 1848. In 1861, Fanny herself would die of injuries sustained when her dress caught fire as she attempted to seal locks of her children’s hair into an envelope; Longfellow’s attempts to save her would result only in his being too badly burned himself to attend her funeral.

Today’s Poem, appearing before that last tragedy yet strangely of a piece with it, represents a fatherly impulse entirely contrary to Jonson’s gesture toward detachment: the impulse to hold and enshrine a particular “hour” of childhood in the imagination. The impulse, in fact, resembles nothing so much as that Victorian gesture of sealing children’s hair in an envelope to keep forever — if not to have it made into rings and brooches, with the idea of its being worn by generations to come. The children may lie in their graves, that impulse says, but the hair perdures as a token of their having existed and been loved.

Longfellow with his second wife, Fanny, and two children, 1849 (Wikimedia Commons)

These trimeter abcb quatrains respond to the fragility of life and the ruthlessness of time by refusing to let go. The poem stops the clock “between the dark and the daylight,” the opening phrase itself an odd reversal of the actual temporal sequence it describes.

It’s evening, the hour between daylight and dark, yet their pouncing on him to “devour” him — an allusion to a German folktale, reproduced in verse by Robert Southey (1774–1843), in which a wicked bishop of Bingen is eaten by rats — occurs as a kind of dawning. The children are figured, comically enough, as “banditti,” as well as those marauding rats of divine judgment. But it is the father, the wily “old mustache,” or bandit, who has the final say. Though they overpower him for the moment, ultimately he captures them in the “fortress” and “dungeon” of the imagination — whose power can invert chronology and pause the forward impulse of time.

If Longfellow’s star has faded over the course of the last century, it’s at least in part a function of our era’s reduced tolerance for sentimentality. And where sentimentality means the substitution of wishful thinking for truthfulness, our era is not all wrong. Still, as we recognize in reading, say, Longfellow’s English contemporary Christina Rossetti, to risk sentimentality is not necessarily to commit it outright. And to shrink from that risk — to retreat into ironic distance, refusing to venture any emotional investment — may be also, if not even more, an artistic sin.

This poem wears its wishful thinking without apology. Contra Jonson, vowing himself to detachment, Longfellow’s Victorian speaker means to cling to those laughing children whose lives, with the moment itself, are fleeing away. Yet the poem concludes on an elegiac concession to the impossibility of this wish. Even the imagination, that stronghold, will — with the mortal body that contains it, with the page on which the poem is written, with the material relics so carefully preserved — “crumble into ruin” and “moulder in dust away.”

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