Sunday Pages: "Twilight"

A poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Note: I am on the road with LB and Allison Gill this weekend—and thanks to everyone who came out last night!—so I’m turning over “Sunday Pages” to Paul Zolbrod, Longfellow champion.

Now in his early nineties, Paul Zolbrod has become aware that as a “Depression Baby” whose memories begin in the thirties, his is the last generation raised in the shadow of the Victorian age and the first to experience the transition to today's fully electronic mass media—radio, movies, television, and digital distribution, with its explosive capacity to arouse all the senses simultaneously. Raised in heavily industrial Pittsburgh among working-class immigrants, and educated at the University of Pittsburgh, he spent thirty years as an English Professor at Allegheny College, then enjoyed a twenty-five year post-retirement career teaching at the Navajo Nation's Dine' College, New Mexico Highlands University, and Pacifica Graduate Institute.  His latest book, Paradise Revisited, a comparison of John Milton’s epic and the Navajo creation story, is scheduled for publication this summer.  

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Guest post by Paul Zolbrod

Now out of favor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was once the English language’s most popular poet. With print the only mass medium in the mid-19th century, he was likely this young nation’s first real celebrity. Written for broad appeal, his poetry still has a disarming, straightforward way about it—much like Norman Rockwell's paintings: so easy to get at that we resist taking both seriously. If so accessible, how can they challenge us? Which may be why his work fell by the critical wayside as 20th century artistic taste matured with the onset of Modernism’s peculiar demands. With it passed a broad taste for reading poems: a taste I and others in my fading generation of “Depression Babies” acquired during our early schooling through the late thirties and early forties—and a taste we would all do well to revive.

Just as Rockwell’s detailed craftsmanship connects with ordinary folks, Longfellow's verbal clarity could put the same observational acumen to work for us with meter and rhyme. His steady lyrics transmitted for us a deeper reality underlying whatever sentiment came into play, unrecognized then but latent as our reading ability grew.  Read today, however, he can still connect. Rather than speaking just for himself, he subordinates his feelings in arousing our own, turning us inward to relate on our terms instead. Take a poem like “Twilight,” whose muted questions beckon a reader to infer a level of compassion:

    The twilight is sad and cloudy,
  The wind blows wild and free,
And like the wings of sea-birds
  Flash the white caps of the sea. 

But in the fisherman’s cottage
  There shines a ruddier light,
And a little face at the window
  Peers out into the night. 

Close, close it is pressed to the window,
  As if those childish eyes
Were looking into the darkness,
  To see some form arise.

    And a woman’s waving shadow
  Is passing to and fro,
Now rising to the ceiling,
  Now bowing and bending low. 

What tale do the roaring ocean,
  And the night-wind, bleak and wild,
As they beat at the crazy casement,
  Tell to that little child? 

And why do the roaring ocean,
  And the night-wind, wild and bleak,
As they beat at the heart of the mother,
  Drive the color from her cheek?

Even the closing questions engage a reader in framing his or her own response rather than promoting the author’s own perspective.  

Likewise, a poem like “Seaweed,” with its metaphoric arousal of storm-like turmoil, invokes some unspecified poet’s restless soul, not his own, so that it becomes ours by association as the pair of shorter lines in each six-line stanza suggest wildly rising waves alternating with the sea’s quieter withdrawal.  So that just as the eastern coast’s stormy waters can unleash seasonal change, so the poet’s shifting ebb and flow of lines and words find their rightful place in every household.

When descends on the Atlantic
      The gigantic
Storm-wind of the equinox,
Landward in his wrath he scourges
      The toiling surges,
Laden with seaweed from the rocks:

From Bermuda’s reefs; from edges
      Of sunken ledges,
In some far-off, bright Azore;
From Bahama, and the dashing,
      Silver-flashing
Surges of San Salvador;

From the tumbling surf, that buries
      The Orkneyan skerries,
Answering the hoarse Hebrides;
And from wrecks of ships, and drifting
      Spars, uplifting
On the desolate, rainy seas; —

Ever drifting, drifting, drifting
      On the shifting
Currents of the restless main;
Till in sheltered coves, and reaches
      Of sandy beaches,
All have found repose again.

So when storms of wild emotion
      Strike the ocean
Of the poet’s soul, erelong
From each cave and rocky fastness,
      In its vastness,
Floats some fragment of a song:

From the far-off isles enchanted,
      Heaven has planted
With the golden fruit of Truth;
From the flashing surf, whose vision
      Gleams Elysian
In the tropic clime of Youth;

From the strong Will, and the Endeavor
      That forever
Wrestle with the tides of Fate;
From the wreck of Hopes far-scattered,
      Tempest-shattered,
Floating waste and desolate; —

Ever drifting, drifting, drifting
      On the shifting
Currents of the restless heart;
Till at length in books recorded,
      They, like hoarded
Household words, no more depart.

The lofty mid-twentieth century modernists, who dismissed Longfellow’s alleged sentimentality, want us readers to penetrate their preferred, densely interior worlds, rather than reflect for ourselves. Think Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens, who with their cloying, free-verse ironies and impacted paradox challenge us to interpret, not just reflect inwardly. Similarly, today’s hip hop artists and concert performers race urgently through their lyrics instrumentally, their thoughts upstaged by the dynamics of production, entertained rather than summoned to reflect.

Not Longfellow. Instead of drawing readers into his mind or of dazzling audiences with the dynamics of staging and lighting, he “sings” us into a deeper self, enriched by observations made two centuries ago during his early European travels, or those gathered at home as this young nation acquired an identity, endured a near collapse over slavery, then regained national stability as industrialization encroached. Yet even with the rise of electronic technology, he could invoke his earlier impressions and his everyday thoughts, along with his lighter moments or darker ones, all with an enduring immediacy. Whether drawing from direct experience or secondarily, he had an ability to stand on "another’s feet," and envision for readers rather than for himself, the way Norman Rockwell makes us see with his brush, then relate inward, preserving thereby a world now lost but echoing in revival. All of this, within the disciplined framework of written verse on the printed page.       

Longfellow’s poetry is generally less about him than for his readers to connect with—just as Norman Rockwell teases us to train our eyes on his subjects—crafted in measured language so crystalline and transparent that it then sends us searching into our deeper selves, much as Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan can do with disarming ease, so that we come away touched by some remembered personal revelation of our own.  That’s why I still like to read him and recommend him to others. Focused outwardly rather than visualized internally, what he describes draws me inward to some aroused sensation that gives an old, now all but but neglected common experience a new dimension of appreciation. Look at “Snow-Flakes:”

     Out of the bosom of the Air, 
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
     Over the woodlands brown and bare,
         Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
               Silent, and soft, and slow
             Descends the snow.

    Even as our cloudy fancies take
        Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
    Even as the troubled heart doth make
      In the white countenance confession,
              The troubled sky reveals
              The grief it feels.

    This is the poem of the air,
        Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
    This is the secret of despair,
        Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
             Now whispered and revealed
             To wood and field.

By prompting associations of our own, good lyric poets sing us through life that way, their voice echoing in our mind’s ear as we read, the images lingering in the mind’s eye as well, imagining how folks lived elsewhere in space and time, and yet relating to them anew with each reading. Free verse poems do that, too, of course—but without the clear sonority that lingers after the poem is read. Lyrical poems reaffirm our connectedness in how they sound and how their imagery sparks the imagination with enduring relevance across the limits of space and time. Watch how this one transmits— “The Slave’s Dream,” found among a small clasp of overlooked poems published separately as Poems on Slavery in 1842—even back then, before the Civil War, as he managed to identify those considered merely as slaves in broader, more empathetic terms:

Beside the ungathered rice he lay,
  His sickle in his hand;
His breast was bare, his matted hair
  Was buried in the sand.
Again, in the mist and shadow of sleep,
  He saw his Native Land. 
Wide through the landscape of his dreams
  The lordly Niger flowed;
Beneath the palm-trees on the plain
  Once more a king he strode;
And heard the tinkling caravans
  Descend the mountain-road. 
He saw once more his dark-eyed queen
  Among her children stand;
They clasped his neck, they kissed his cheeks,
  They held him by the hand!—
A tear burst from the sleeper's lids
  And fell into the sand. 
And then at furious speed he rode
  Along the Niger’s bank;
His bridle-reins were golden chains,
  And, with a martial clank,
At each leap he could feel his scabbard of steel
  Smiting his stallion's flank. 
Before him, like a blood-red flag,
  The bright flamingoes flew;
From morn till night he followed their flight,
  O'er plains where the tamarind grew,
Till he saw the roofs of Caffre huts,
  And the ocean rose to view. 
At night he heard the lion roar,
  And the hyena scream,
And the river-horse, as he crushed the reeds
  Beside some hidden stream;
And it passed, like a glorious roll of drums,
  Through the triumph of his dream. 
The forests, with their myriad tongues,
  Shouted of liberty;
And the Blast of the Desert cried aloud,
  With a voice so wild and free,
That he started in his sleep and smiled
  At their tempestuous glee. 
He did not feel the driver's whip,
  Nor the burning heat of day;
For Death had illumined the Land of Sleep,
  And his lifeless body lay
A worn-out fetter, that the soul
  Had broken and thrown away! 

Mention Longfellow to my fellow nonagenarians today, and watch eyes widen and faces light up, even after all these years. Ours was the last generation to be schooled by that now neglected poet, as we made our way past the primary into secondary school, gaining skill as readers introduced to a poem like “The Village Blacksmith,” where we acquired first-hand the capacity to imagine how kids a century earlier stopped at a foundry door on the way home from school to watch the sparks fly as he forges:

     Under a spreading chestnut-tree
     ⁠The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
     With large and sinewy hands,
And the muscles of his brawny arms
     Are strong as iron bands.

     His hair is crisp, and black, and long;
     His face is like the tan;
      His brow is wet with honest sweat,
     He earns what e'er he can,

      And looks the whole world in the face,
     For he owes not any man.
       Week in, week out, from morn till night,
      You can hear his bellows blow;
  You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,
     With measured beat and slow,
  Like a sexton ringing the village bell,
     When the evening sun is low.

      And children coming home from school
     Look in at the open door;

      They love to see the flaming forge,
     And hear the bellows roar

      And catch the burning sparks that fly
     Like chaff from a threshing-floor. . . .    

Amidst today’s media clutter, can we stop to wonder how such poems might have registered with us then? We were learning to read Longfellow at a level where we began to recognize poetry as something worth studying and learning, like arithmetic opening the doorway to mathematics. Is there a now a missing legacy in a post-literate age, where amplification, rich visual edification, social media, and mass participation displace solitary reading? 

Here’s how I now regard it. As with those lines in “Twilight,” where with a teacher’s gentle prodding we pre-teens could relate to that little face peering into the night, we could also sit vicariously with those kids at the blacksmith’s foundry door, empowered to see inwardly by the poem’s vivid diction: There to summon each for ourselves an image of flaming forge and flying sparks. Or so I felt back then, before video compromised my picture-making awareness, along with sometimes memorizing it implanted a poem’s very texture in my brain.    

Looking back now, it seems conceivable that Longfellow articulated my first empathetic impression of some other child’s feelings more intimately than a picture could as a result of that first literary classroom connection. I may not have realized it then, but its effects were taking seed, as were those of other Longfellow poems we were learning to read. As even now a reader today can relate to Longfellow’s construct of an imagined slave’s dying dream, whether or not we youngsters may have read that poem back then.

Arguably, on the printed page poetry makes connections not reckoned as deeply when just heard aloud.  Performed at someone else’s pace as opposed to reading alone, it can gallop when for a reader it should trot, or even graze. In concert with the mind’s ear, the eye sets the pace for the inner voice, allowing the reader to stay apace—all the easier for a youngster learning to negotiate poetry’s magic, especially with Longfellow’s clear, resonant lyric voice.  

Now in long-term retrospect, I suggest that literature invites reflective thinking in contrast with empirical analysis—a more subtle skill than calculation demands, especially at a time when education’s focus veers vocationally STEM-ward, and away from the Humanities. As does literature itself, poetry summons us to reach beyond reason to understand intuitively as we try to make quantum connections to overcome gaps in what we know and even how we feel.

At a crucial time in this young country’s formation, Longfellow realized that a seismic statehood change occurred:  constitutional democracy displaced royalty in running a nation. But if government of and by the people was to endure, an educated citizenry was needed. This had to be a literate nation, which for Longfellow required a yeomen class of poetry readers, starting at the schoolroom level. And which became a singular obsession of his, whose full story in that regard underlies his long career as public poet, Harvard professor, and distinguished translator of poetry, well told by Christof Irmscher in his recent study, Longfellow Redux.

Now in my retrospective years, having watched alphabetical literacy give way to digital omniscience, I wonder if something has been lost with Longfellow’s demise as an early schoolroom poet. Together with the eclipse of fellow “Fireside Poets” like John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, William Cullen Bryant, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, they articulated at a level we understood an outlook emerging then but now missing from our national dialogue with World War II’s end in an accelerating onrush of technological change.

With that came a flush of national power tempered by a “Communist menace,” and a lingering sense of national vulnerability scarcely recognized in what those poets instilled. Leaving in its wake for me as a nonagenarian a memory of leaning to read, letter by letter, line by line, and page by page, helped by teachers to make that cognitive leap with no greater technological apparatus than an open book: no overhead projector, no PowerPoint, no tablets, no smartphones, no belching tweets in place of measured discourse, while at the same time coming of age in the flush of global victory and unprecedented national wealth widely shared. Could all of that have something to do with bringing on the vague feeling of lost greatness as the 20th century gave way to the present one?   

For my generation, literacy reached a first plateau with poems by Longfellow and his contemporaries in our middle and junior high years—opening us to literary study the way learning times tables gave way to higher math, thanks to a rudimentary poetic idiom, where lyricism and colloquial speech overlap, as they still do with Johnny Cash and the Carters. That early rite of educational passage makes our generation of “Depression Babies” the last to attain full literacy by reading Longfellow in the classroom before television filled our lives and at the same time the first generation to give way to video and digital technology as a learning tool—all while coming of age on a national high as victorious Americans emerging from World War II: a curious point for the conversion of three trends, which may have made old Victorian values seem quaint and obsolete, or so I now speculate.

Now I find myself wondering if, with the demise of Longfellow and his fellow schoolroom poets as a pathway to further reading, something has gone missing from today’s dialogue: some shared set of values and standards unifying sacred with secular, individual with community, strictly nationalistic and globally universal. Re-reading Longfellow now and reconsidering his commitment to making ours a strong civic society of poetry readers, I see that missing component not in such categorically specific terms, but as something essential to a republic given to promoting poetry as an arsenal of rich civic life, starting in the early classroom years.

An extravagant assertion?  To be sure; but after living a long, productive life as an educator myself, I get to make one or two of those. And if given a chance, I can back it up by revisiting three of Longfellow’s major long narrative poems—all widely popular in his day—two of which we were all required to read during our early adolescent years, and one which many of us read on our own: They included Evangeline, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Song of Hiawatha. Each in its own way a milestone—a first experience with what I took as exemplary literary masterpieces and fondly remembered that way: each reaching back to a fixture in our American heritage whose influence had prevailed as part of our shared schooling then, but hardly so now, yet still worth talking about.

Anyone interested?

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Photo credit: Padmanah via Wikipedia. Longfellow statue in Portland, Maine.