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 the extent to which a single literary figure could command the imagination of an entire culture. But Longfellow’s reach was enormous.

People recited his verse in their parlors of an evening, or at town socials. Phrases from Longfellow, like phrases from Shakespeare, have passed so completely into our common language that we don’t even stop to ask who first spoke of ships that pass in the night. His epic-length poems, “Paul Revere’s Ride,”  “Evangeline,” and “The Song of Hiawatha,” entered the canon of American mythology — which they might be said to have created in the first place.  As a testimony to his stature as a Great American, not to mention his stature as the author of “The Song of Hiawatha,” Longfellow was invited in the late 1850s to supply an indigenous name for the territory that eventually became Idaho (It’s a measure, perhaps, of our shifting scale of cultural values, that a hundred years later the poet Marianne Moore was asked by the Ford Motor Company to name a new car. Just as Longfellow supplied many words of possibly less dubious indigenous origins than Idaho, Moore’s long list of suggestions included Utopian Turtletop, for example, but not Edsel). 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1868 (Wikimedia Commons)

Although Longfellow dominated the American cultural landscape of the nineteenth century as an all-purpose Great Man, over the last hundred years he has lapsed into relative obscurity. If twenty-first-century readers notice him at all, too often it’s to sneer at him for his sentimentality and moralizing (he was prone to both), or to parody the (admittedly inviting) metronomic trochaic tetrameter of “The Song of Hiawatha.” As John Morton suggests, Longfellow’s very status as “the lion of all the drawing rooms” — a status the poet himself actively cultivated — might well have been the undoing of his posthumous reputation. Partly, says Morton, we can credit the fading of Longfellow’s star to the enduring Modernist allergy to anything Victorian. The more eminent the Victorian, the worse the outbreak of aesthetic hives. And then there’s our current reflexive mistrust of Great Men. The greater the man, the greater the likelihood that dark cancellable secrets lurk beneath the mantle of greatness. But more essentially, celebrity as a state of being is just like that. It’s cyclical. Today you’re famous; tomorrow somebody else is. Today they’re naming an elementary school after you; tomorrow’s first graders know you only as the name of a school. 

“The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls” acknowledges this phenomenon as much as it acknowledges the larger phenomenon of human mortality. A late work, appearing in Longfellow’s 1880 Ultima Thule, “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls” is an old man’s poem of farewell, meditative, elegiac, but strikingly forthright. The motion of the iambic tetrameter, from unstressed to stressed syllable, over and over,  disturbed by an occasional anapestic lilt, recalls the rise and fall of the sea which frames the poem’s shifting actions and scenes.

It’s a poem made of repetitions, most notably the a-rhyme — falls, calls, walls, stalls — which recurs throughout the three quintets, or five-line stanzas. That sound is omnipresent and changeless, a backdrop for the movement of time, from day to night to day again. Between nightfall and daybreak, the great sea goes on chafing at its shores, always moving, never moved, not caring that the traveler who has come home will never see it again. It has erased his footsteps and forgotten him.

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The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
      And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
      And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
      And the tide rises, the tide falls.

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