She was rigorously educated by her Congressman father Timothy Fuller and somewhat erratically also attended private schools For a brief period, one of her classmates was young Oliver Wendell Holmes, the future poet and professor. Sarah Margaret Fuller was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, now the far eastern part of Cambridge itself, in a home still standing which now serves as the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House. For decades dismissed as a somewhat antagonistic friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson or minor Transcendentalist, she has since taken her place as an important figure of women’s history, literature, reform movements, and literary criticism. In recent years Fuller has drawn significant interest. Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), a contemporary of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), was also one of his most vocal critics. Detail from "Authors of the United States," engraved by Alexander Hay Ritchie after Thomas Hicks, 1865. Longfellow certainly made his.Margaret Fuller, seated next to Richard Henry Dana Sr. This poem has been popular at funerals in particular, suggesting as it does that we can make our mark on the world before we leave it. We’ll conclude this selection of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s greatest poems with one of his most famous, not least because of the memorable line about ‘footprints on the sands of time’.
See the link above to read the full, longer poem.
Longfellow’s poem explores the links between the temporal and ethereal, the present and the past – arguing that a ‘bridge of light’ connects the seen and unseen worlds. These ‘inoffensive ghosts’ surround us as we dine, and the hall is filled with them.
With feet that make no sound upon the floors … The harmless phantoms on their errands glide, This holiday poem, then, is a world away from the image of the family by the seaside with a bucket and spade – it’s about an inner peace that holiday time can bring.Īll houses wherein men have lived and diedĪre haunted houses. Holidays, then, are less about going away somewhere different and having fun, and more a state of mind, a feeling, an act of remembrance and self-discovery. The ‘holiest’ of holidays are the ones we keep by ourselves, the ‘secret anniversaries of the heart’. This sonnet by Longfellow reminds us of the etymology of the word ‘holiday’ as ‘holy day’. The happy days unclouded to their close …
SAIL FORTH LONGFELLOW FULL
When the full river of feeling overflows. In this poem, Longfellow reflects nostalgically on his lost youth in America. The pleasant streets of that dear old town,Īnd the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.’ There is no escape from dreary thoughts or dreary weather, it would seem. This brings the stanza back to where it started, but not simply by virtue of finding a rhyme for ‘dreary’: instead, ‘dreary’ is rhymed against itself, in a feature which I propose we call the ‘homorhyme’ (which is different from rime riche in that identical words, rather than mere homophones, are paired with each other). Longfellow deftly conveys the cyclical nature of suffering – something it shares with the weather – through his rhyme scheme, which is aabba in the first two stanzas. The phrase ‘into each life some rain must fall’ has become famous, and it originated in this poem, which beautifully captures the misery and dreariness of a day when the rain never lets up. The vine still clings to the mouldering wall, The river carries important memories for Longfellow – memories of important friends he has known – and this is one reason why he eulogises it here in this less famous poem. In ‘To the River Charles’, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82), who is best known as the author of Hiawatha, praises the Charles river in Massachusetts. The poet composing a ‘song’ or poem is much like the archer shooting his arrow: the poet doesn’t know where his words will take root. The poet shoots an arrow into the air, but doesn’t know where it lands. Bearing some formal and thematic similarities to William Blake’s ‘A Poison Tree’, this short Longfellow poem – its three stanzas are reproduced above – has the force of a parable.
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