Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  FIGURE 8: The expulsion of the Acadians from Grand Pré, from F. O. C. Darley’s 1866 illustrations for Evangeline (1847).

  The poem evolved slowly. There were other projects to distract him. In 1842 he was busy writing The Spanish Student, amid the labors of teaching and running his department. Then he went abroad for his water-cure, then got married, then in 1844–45 labored over the eight hundred pages of his poetry anthology. He undertook another, much briefer, anthology in English, published in 1846 as The Estray, which was to include as its proem a short lyric called “Pegasus in Pound.” It vividly expressed his frustrations with Harvard. When the winged steed of Poetry arrives one day in a quiet village, the villagers throw him into the cattle pound and put him up for sale. Stared at but unfed, he finally has enough and breaks loose to return to the heavens. (He leaves behind a soothing spring, rather generous in the circumstances.)

  It was not until 1845 that Longfellow was able to turn his full attention back to his “tale of Acadie,” which he decided to cast in the classic measure of epic poetry, unrhymed hexameter—a difficult enough feat in Greek or Latin, but a formidable challenge to a poet writing in English. The long, stately, lumbering lines that resulted tend to put off modern readers (though generations of schoolboys have cracked up at such lines as “Sweet was her breath as the breath of the kine that feed in the meadows”). Yet when read aloud by a practiced voice to a patient audience, the music of the poem remains hauntingly beautiful.

  Longfellow struck the bardic note immediately—“This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, / Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight”—one of the most famous openings in all of American poetry. He was not, of course, describing the real coast of Acadian Nova Scotia, which he had never visited; the scene suggests the forests of Sweden or Maine, for this was to be framed as a northern epic. Savvy French farmers, the Acadian settlers had in fact chosen the lowlands around the Basin of Minas, where they had with great ingenuity and much effort built dikes to reclaim the rich salt marshes for farmland and pasture—an example of good husbandry, but not the landscape of epic poetry. Interestingly, for a long poem that is consistently so visual, Longfellow had seen none of the far-flung places he wrote about in Evangeline except the city of Philadelphia. For his color, he relied on his visit to John Banvard’s heroic diorama of the Mississippi, which he had seen in Boston, and on such works as Audubon’s Birds of America. Neither Homer nor Vergil, he might have pointed out, had actually seen Troy.

  Banvard proved particularly useful (as did the Austrian travel writer Sealfield, who had explored the Louisiana swamps). Banvard was an itinerant painter and adventurer who had spent his youth on the Mississippi. In the spring of 1840, he had descended the river with his sketchbook in a small skiff, stopping to draw each point and bend in the then still-wild landscape. He had determined to create the largest painting in the history of the world, a three-mile length of canvas that, turning upon cylinders, would enable the paying spectator to feel as if he had actually traveled down the Mississippi, from the mouth of the Missouri to New Orleans. Longfellow visited the spectacle during its Boston exhibition in the mid 1840s and borrowed heavily from its visual depiction of vine-covered banks, deep forests, mossy bayous, and the prairie country beyond the Ozarks. He may also have relied on a pamphlet describing the panorama in some detail, published in Boston in 1847.

  Despite efforts by nineteenth-century critics to say that Longfellow borrowed heavily from Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea or even the Biblical story of the Jews’ Babylonian captivity, Evangeline is a strikingly original work in concept, if not in poetical diction. The story follows the history books fairly accurately at first, in its account of the forced meeting of the Acadian males in the church at Grand Pré, the draconian orders of Colonel Winslow (whose manuscript journal Longfellow had consulted at the Massachusetts Historical Society), the terrible scenes on the beach as families were separated, sometimes never to meet again. There is genuine pathos in the moment when the abandoned herds return from pasture, their udders swollen with milk, waiting in vain for the milkmaids who will never return to them. To any educated nineteenth-century reader, the flames of the burning village as seen from the crowded shore would have evoked the night of Aeneas’s escape from the pillage of Troy. From that point on, the story takes on a phantasmagoric quality as the young Evangeline, first accompanied by the priest Father Felician, then entirely on her own, retraces her bridegroom Gabriel’s footsteps across a great swath of North America.

  The scenes in the bayous of southern Louisiana are perhaps best known: the couple’s near-meeting on the Atchafalaya was a moment that moved Victorian readers to tears as reliably as anything in Dickens. Moored among the willows, made drowsy by the noontime heat and the thickness of the magnolia-scented air, Evangeline and her party fall asleep in their pirogue.

  Nearer, and ever nearer, among the numberless islands,

  Darted a light, swift boat, that sped away o’er the water,

  Urged on its course by the sinewy arms of the hunters and trappers.

  Northward its prow was turned, to the land of the bison and the beaver.

  At the helm sat a youth, with countenance thoughtful and careworn.

  Dark and neglected locks overshadowed his brow, and a sadness

  Somewhat beyond his years on his face was legibly written.

  Gabriel was it, who, weary with waiting, unhappy and restless,

  Sought in the Western wilds oblivion of self and of sorrow.

  Swiftly they glided along, close under the lee of the island,

  But by the opposite bank, and behind a screen of palmettos,

  So that they saw not the boat, where it lay concealed in the willows;

  All undisturbed by the dash of their oars, and, unseen, were the sleepers.

  Angel of God was there none to awaken the slumbering maiden.

  As melodrama, this is hard to beat, however much of a smile it may bring to a modern reader, who can hear the silent-movie-house piano player banging away in the background. Yet it touched deftly—and as quickly as Gabriel’s boat—on that great theme of loss that characterizes so much of American sentimental poetry. And it represents a real-life moment—two loved ones narrowly missing each other because of some accident of travel—that must have been a wrenching everyday experience in an age of less than reliable communications. The touch of genius is, of course, that these are not ships that pass in the night (to borrow a phrase from Longfellow’s “Elizabeth” in Tales of a Wayside Inn): Evangeline and Gabriel miss each other in the full light of the blazing Louisiana sun.

  She does not get near to him again for some twenty years, although there are several close misses. But it is in her western wanderings, through the Ozarks and into the Great Plains, among the Indians and the trappers, that Evangeline proves herself a literally epic hero. Her beauty fades, yet her wanderings rival (and in duration surpass) those of Ulysses.

  Thus did the long sad years glide on, and in seasons and places

  Divers and distant far was seen the wandering maiden;—

  Now in the Tents of Grace of the meek Moravian Missions,

  Now in the noisy camps and the battle-fields of the army,

  Now in secluded hamlets, in towns and populous cities.

  Like a phantom she came, and passed away unremembered.

  Fair was she and young, when in hope began the journey;

  Faded was she and old, when in disappointment it ended.

  Each succeeding year stole something away from her beauty,

  Leaving behind it, broader and deeper, the gloom and the shadow.

  Then there appeared and spread faint streaks of gray o’er her forehead,

  Dawn of another life, that broke o’er her earthly horizon,

  As in the eastern sky the first faint streaks of the morning.

  The depiction of Evangeline’s triumph over a hostile environment was Longfellow’s great achievement
, in a poem too often dismissed as a stale endorsement of nineteenth-century patriarchy and the importance of female loyalty to a husband. His Evangeline is not so much a person as an idea in motion: not simply the conventional idea of feminine constancy, but the larger idea—which manages to be both personal and political—that it is only a woman who can set things to order again, who can mend that which has been ripped apart, who can heal the wounds men have inflicted. When Evangeline, now a nursing sister, finally meets the dying Gabriel in the Philadelphia charity hospital, their reunion stands for the bringing together again of all the scattered Acadians—indeed, of all exiled peoples—in an imagined world where the Christian charity of women has redeemed the misdeeds of men. Certainly this helps explain why Evangeline, an almost totally invented character, became the foundational myth of Acadian ethnic identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and, to a very large degree, remains so today, in maritime Canada, northern Maine, and ’Cajun Louisiana). She was a plaster saint to some, but her very lack of definition made her all the more able to receive whatever meanings Longfellow’s many readers sought to pour into her.

  Recent scholarship on gender relations in nineteenth-century American culture has revealed Evangeline as a much more fruitful and complex achievement than it had seemed in the heyday of purely formalist criticism. For one thing, in celebrating his heroine’s constancy in the face of so much ill fortune, so many undeserved setbacks, Longfellow is celebrating his own patient and long-suffering quest for Fanny’s love. And he has turned the received notion of gender on its head: in a world that validates male achievement, male heroism, male ingenuity, his Evangeline is a person of considerable agency, a woman who survives by her wits over a sprawling, untamed American wilderness that had crippled or destroyed many of the men who had ventured there. The great American theme of conquest, of marching to destiny’s drumbeat ever westward, is subtly undermined by this persistent little Acadian farm girl, who takes on the vast continent and survives, only to return east to her greater destiny. There, amid the cholera victims, the Sister of Mercy finds the aged Gabriel, who survives long enough to recognize her and lay his dying head on her bosom. How long she survives him, tending the sick, the poet does not say, but the implication is that she is soon buried beside him.

  Still stands the forest primeval; but far away from its shadow,

  Side by side, in their nameless graves, the lovers are sleeping.

  Under the humble walls of the little Catholic churchyard,

  In the heart of the city, they lie, unknown and unnoticed.

  Daily the tides of life go ebbing and flowing beside them,

  Thousands of throbbing hearts, where theirs are at rest and forever,

  Thousands of aching brains, where theirs no longer are busy,

  Thousands of toiling hands, where theirs have ceased from their labors,

  Thousands of weary feet, where theirs have completed their journey!

  Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie was finished in February of 1847 and heavily edited by the poet’s friends Sumner, Hillard, and Felton (who paid particular attention to correcting the meter). By way of relief, Longfellow immediately began his comic prose tale, Kavanagh, which was to owe a good deal of its New England village subject matter to his sojourns at the Verandah and, more important, in Pittsfield, in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts.

  A daughter, named Frances after her mother, was born on April 7—the first recorded use of ether in childbirth in America. (“The effect was magical,” Longfellow wrote to his mother. “All pain instantly ceased. . . .” He was so impressed, he went to Boston the next day and had a broken tooth “extracted under the etherial vapor.”) It seems particularly fitting that a poet whose work so often attempts to assuage the reader’s pain should have encouraged his wife to undergo so controversial a procedure. The controversy was not over anesthesia’s unknown risks (it was soon discovered that ether actually prolonged labor), but over the conventional religious view that the pain of childbirth was something God intended women to have to endure.

  Evangeline was published by William D. Ticknor & Co. on November 1, 1847, although Longfellow dated some presentation copies October 30 so that he could say that the baby was christened and the new poem published on the same day. Hawthorne soon wrote: “I have read Evangeline with more pleasure than it would be decorous to express. It cannot fail, I think, to prove the most triumphant of all your successes.” This may have been pure friendliness, but it proved prophetic: no other work of Longfellow’s was to have so deep and enduring an impact on the world. The poem was a popular sensation, even if some critics disliked the hexameters or found the heroine “insipid.” By the summer of 1848, with Evangeline in its sixth printing, Longfellow was the most famous writer in America.

  Hawthorne repeated his praise in public, declaring in the Salem Advertiser that a lesser writer would only have brought out the “gloom and wretchedness” of the story; “it required the true poet’s deeper insight to present it to us, as we find it here, its pathos illuminated with beauty,—so that the impression of the poem is nowhere dismal nor dispondent, and glows with the purest sunshine where we might least expect it, on the pauper’s death-bed.” John Greenleaf Whittier, writing in the Washington abolitionist paper, The National Era, exclaimed: “Eureka!—Here, then, we have it at last! An American poem, with the lack of which British reviewers have so long reproached us.” A learned but anonymous reviewer in the American Literary Magazine, on the other hand, felt uneasy about the hexameters (indeed, picked many of them apart) and warned that “it is still a hazardous experiment to force the English language into that mold.” Typical of the briefer reviews that appeared in most American newspapers was the Examiner’s comment: “It is a tale of simple earnestness, very graceful, and amid its unexaggerated truthfulness animated by a tranquil and lofty spirit of endurance.” Evangeline soon found British admirers as well. Fraser’s Magazine reported: “This is an American poem, full of beauties of really indigenous American growth; and we hail its appearance with the greater satisfaction, inasmuch as it is the first genuine Castalian fount which has burst from the soil of America.”

  Longfellow was inundated with letters from admirers. Among those that touched him most deeply was one from Laura Bridgman, the world-famous young woman who was deaf, dumb, and blind yet had learned to communicate with her fingers. She was the star pupil at the Perkins Institute for the Blind, in South Boston, one of the most successful of Samuel Gridley Howe’s many reform efforts. (Dickens had written warmly of the Institute in his American Sketches.) Early in 1852, her teacher Emma Goodwin had “read” Evangeline to Bridgman, who was delighted by the story and talked about it for days. “I am so much interested in thinking of Evangeline who devoted all her time in doing so very much good to the sick and afflicted people during her life,” Bridgman wrote the poet. He replied, “Certainly I have never received any commendation of that poem so valuable as this, or that goes so directly to the heart.” Her teacher told a newspaper reporter that one of Bridgman’s few bad habits was kicking cats, for which she had an antipathy, “though generally humane and gentle.” One day she asked Goodwin if Evangeline had ever kicked a cat. “I told her no, Evangeline would never have been rude towards anyone. She looked the picture of humiliation, and has not been so vindictive against her enemy, the cat, since.”

  Public acceptance of Evangeline despite its unfamiliar meter brought great satisfaction to Longfellow, but he was unable to enjoy his good fortune for very long. On September 9, 1848, the day after Longfellow had finished reading a life of Keats, he became alarmed by little Frances’s ill health. The doctor was at first reassuring, only to change his mind the next day. “A day of agony, of doubt and fear!” Longfellow wrote in his journal. “The physicians have no longer any hope. I cannot yet abandon it. Motionless, she lies; only a little moan now and then escaping from her lips.” He sat with the doctor watching her through the night. “Lower and lower. Through the silen
t, desolate room the clocks tick loud; they all seem laboring on with the fatal hour!” At 4:30 p.m. on the 11th, she died, aged one year, five months. “Fanny and [her sister] Mary sat with me by her bed side. Her breathing grew fainter, fainter—fainter, and ceased with a sigh, without a flutter—perfectly quiet, perfectly painless. The sweetest expression was on her face. Death seemed lovelier than life.” She was buried at noon on the 12th at Mount Auburn Cemetery. The previous day, her elderly nurse had carried her body down the Craigie House stairs, through Longfellow’s study, and into the library, where prayers were said and she was placed in her coffin. “For a long time I sat by her alone in the darkened Library. The twilight fell softly on her placid face and the white flowers she held in her little hands. In the deep silence the bird sang from the hall, a sad strain—a melancholy requiem. It touched and soothed me.” He found some relief the next day in the routine of college work. Visiting the damp and chilly cemetery that afternoon with the other children, Longfellow was told by Charley that little Fanny had gone up into the sky. “Who told you that?” “Mama.” “What is she doing there?” “She is playing with the rain; and throwing it down on me.” Longfellow asked himself a few days later if this death had paralyzed his affections for his other children. “Can this be? No, they are but deadened and benumbed for a moment.” He was to deal with his grief in the poem “Resignation,” one of his most popular short pieces among his Victorian readers.