CHAPTER XI

HOW SOME OF THE GREAT POEMS WERE WRITTEN

We have already often spoken of the “Psalm of Life,” perhaps the greatest poem Longfellow ever wrote. He composed it in his room at the Craigie House, which had been Washington’s chamber. The death of his young wife had afflicted him deeply, and one day as he sat between two windows, looking sadly out, this poem came into his mind and he wrote it. For a long time no one knew of its existence, and it was not until many months later that he sent it to be published. “The Reaper and the Flowers” was written in much the same way, and “The Light of Stars” was composed on a serene and beautiful summer evening, exactly suggestive of the poem.

Longfellow himself tells how “The Wreck of the Hesperus” was written. Says he:

“This is one of the poems which I like to recall. It floats in my mind again and again, whenever I read of some of our frightful storms on the coast. Away back in the year when the ‘Voices of the Night’ was published, in the closing month of the year, the New England coast was lashed by a terrible tempest: and there were numerous shipwrecks recorded. I remember reading in the newspapers one day of the loss of a schooner on the reef of Norman’s Woe, called ‘The Hesperus.’ Norman’s Woe is, as you are aware, a frowning mass of rocks, surrounded by the ocean, not far from Gloucester. It occurred to me to write a ballad, which I did some days afterwards, while I was sitting alone one night by the fire in the room above.”

The fact is, after writing part of it he went to bed, and being unable to sleep, got up and wrote the remainder.

“Excelsior” probably stands next to the “Psalm of Life” as a popular favorite. One evening, also in that chamber of Washington’s at the Craigie House, after he had been at a party, Longfellow caught sight of this word on a torn piece of newspaper. Lying near was a letter from Charles Sumner, and immediately he began to write on the back of this, crowding the stanzas in as best he could. Later he carefully rewrote the poem, and changed it in many parts. The next time Sumner visited the Craigie House he was shown the letter, and he asked to have it back. Longfellow gave it him, and Sumner always kept it as a treasure. When he died he left it by will to Harvard College.

Once in answer to a letter Longfellow gave the following explanation of the meaning of the poem:

“My intention in writing it was no more than to display, in a series of pictures, the life of a man of genius, resisting all temptations, laying aside all fears, heedless of all warnings, and pressing right on to accomplish his purpose. His motto is ‘Excelsior’—higher. He passes through the Alpine village, through the rough, cold paths of the world, where the peasants cannot understand him, and where his watchword is ‘an unknown tongue.’ He disregards the happiness of domestic peace, and sees the glaciers—his fate—before him. He disregards the warnings of the old man’s wisdom and the fascinations of woman’s love. He answers to all, ‘Higher yet!’ The monks of St. Bernard are the representatives of religious forms and ceremonies; and with their oft-repeated prayer mingles the sound of his voice, telling them there is something higher than forms or ceremonies. Filled with these aspirations, he pushes forward; and the voice heard in the air is the promise of immortality and progress ever upward, without having reached the perfection he longed for.”

“The Village Blacksmith” is another poem with a history. It will be remembered that we have already said that Longfellow’s great-grandfather was a blacksmith. The “village smithy” “under a spreading chestnut tree”—the one about which Longfellow wrote the poem, though his grandfather was never there—stood on Brattle Street, in Cambridge. After a time it had to be removed. Some of the branches were cut off the chestnut tree, that a dwelling-house might be put up, and it then looked so ugly that the town authorities ordered it to be cut down.

This made Longfellow feel very sad. The year before he made a sketch of the shop and the tree, just as they stood, and this rough sketch has been published. On the morning the tree was cut down, every one crowded out to see the choppers at work, and gaze at the tree as it tumbled over.

On his seventy-second birthday the children of Cambridge presented Longfellow with an arm-chair made out of the wood of the old chestnut tree. It was a handsome chair, jet black and finely carved with horse chestnuts and leaves. Inscribed around it was a verse from the poem:

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.

The chair was upholstered in green leather, and there was a brass plate under the cushion, on which was inscribed:

“_To the author of ‘The Village Blacksmith,’ this chair, made from the wood of the spreading chestnut tree, is presented as an expression of grateful regard and veneration by the children of Cambridge, who, with their friends, join in the best wishes and congratulations on this anniversary, Feb. 27, 1879._”

Longfellow was very much pleased by this and wrote a poem to the children, entitled “From My Arm-chair.” You may read it in any volume of his poems.

One more poem of which we must speak is “The Skeleton in Armor.” Said Longfellow once, “This ballad was suggested to me while riding on the seashore at Newport. A year or two previous a skeleton had been dug up at Fall River, clad in broken and corroded armor; and the idea occurred to me of connecting it with the round tower at Newport, generally known, hitherto, as the Old Windmill, though now claimed by the Danes as a work of their early ancestors.”

When the poem was written some of Longfellow’s friends, probably the members of that “Five of Clubs,” thought it was beneath his dignity; but others were so enthusiastic about it that when one of them read it aloud to him very appreciatively he sprang to his feet and embraced him, and paid no more attention to the criticisms. He was thinking about the subject, after his visit to the skeleton that had been dug up, for more than a year before the poem flashed into his mind.