Today’s Poem: The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the tides of celebrity

William Trost Richards, Seascape With Distant Lighthouse, 1873 (Wikimedia Commons)

Today is the birthday of the nineteenth-century American Fireside Poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) — so famous in his lifetime that schoolchildren all over the expanding country celebrated this day as a kind of civic feast. It’s hard for us, maybe, to imagine …