Shelley once said that the virtue of long narrative poems was that moments of true poetic intensity could be found amid all the connective tissue. This suggests one way of reading The Song of Hiawatha today. Take, for example, Canto XIII, “Blessing the Corn-fields.” Longfellow seems to have instinctively grasped what later anthropologists would record—the prevalence across cultures of female fertility rites—and he paints his nocturne accordingly. But it has a distinctive sweetness of touch, amid its strangeness, which is not ethnologically truthful so much as Longfellovian:
In the night, when all is silence,
In the night, when all is darkness,
When the Spirit of Sleep, Nephawin,
Shuts the doors of all the wigwams,
So that not an ear can hear you,
So that not an eye can see you,
Rise up from your bed in silence,
Lay aside your garments wholly,
Walk around the fields you planted,
Round the borders of the corn-fields,
Covered by your tresses only,
Robed with darkness as a garment.
Thus the trees shall be more fruitful,
And the passing of your footsteps
Draw a magic circle around them,
So that neither blight nor mildew,
Neither burrowing worm nor insect,
Shall pass o’er the magic circle. . . .
The poem is filled with these quiet moments amid the quasi-Wagnerian stagecraft of its battling monsters and treacherous neighbors, magic mittens and trickster-heroes.
There are at least two other ways of reading the poem. Several commentators have sought to historicize it. During the long preparation of the manuscript, Longfellow’s journal is filled with references to runaway slaves, the iniquity of the Fugitive Slave Law, and Sumner’s speeches in favor of abolition. With its opening panorama of the great peace-pipe ceremony uniting all the nations through its depiction of disease, famine, and treachery, The Song of Hiawatha in this view expresses both its author’s hopes for peace and his anxiety that the nation would break apart.
The other approach is to accept the poem as a successful exercise in the passage-of-empire mode that so many of its critics have deplored. By this reading, The Song of Hiawatha becomes an anti-Aeneid, the song of the unmaking of a city. Hiawatha sets out to civilize his people, to tame the wild forces of nature that threaten them, to turn them into a settled and literate agricultural nation preserving its own culture while keeping peace with its neighbors. So often criticized for its episodic nature, the poem in fact has an overarching structure, reaching its height at the Wedding-Feast, and already declining—it is difficult to say by whose fault—long before the first sighting of the white man’s footstep. But the reader can take no satisfaction in this fateful turn of events. When the white men do appear, and Hiawatha departs in his canoe “to the portals of the Sunset,” it is not New Englanders who stand among the aboriginals. It is the Black-Robes, bringing French Catholic Christianity. The disappearance of this “race” in turn from the heartland of North America furnished the great theme for Longfellow’s friend, the historian Francis Parkman. Two great empires had struggled for Hiawatha’s land; each had failed. Longfellow can be read as asking us: what makes us think that we shall endure?
A Lock of Hair
SURVIVAL HAD ITS DOMESTIC DIMENSION AS well. The Longfellows had already lost one infant, who died too young to be photographed or painted, but of whom there remained in the house a wisp of a blonde curl, wrapped in paper and labeled “Little Fanny. Sept. 11. 1848.” This precautionary tactic—the saving of locks of children’s hair—was more than a sentimental gesture in an age when a minor illness could quickly turn fatal. When one of the three girls of “The Children’s Hour” had her hair cut on the hot afternoon of July 9, 1861, their mother went to some trouble to collect a lock of it, walk into the library, fold it into a little packet of paper, and seal it with a stick of molten wax, softened over a candle. This was a rather old-fashioned procedure, by 1861, but the act of sealing confirmed the solemnity of the gesture. Precisely what happened next is not known. A gust of wind may have spread the flame. Or Fanny may have brushed her loose sleeve too close to it. Or the candle may have been knocked over. In an instant the front of her gauzy summer housedress caught fire. Its very lightness over its steel hoops hastened the flames, as the pockets of air caught between the layers of cotton intensified the combustion. She ran through a small vestibule into the front study where Longfellow was sitting, possibly even dozing in the warm summer weather. He tried throwing a rug around her, but it was too small. She broke away, ran for the door, turned and rushed back toward him. The flames must have been dying, for he was able to hug her in an attempt to protect her face. By this point her lower body and torso (though not her face) were badly burned, her dress destroyed; he suffered lesser burns to his face and hands. Someone ran for the doctor while Fanny was carried up to her room.
FIGURE 10: Ernest Longfellow’s sketch of the meadow between the Craigie House and the Charles River, 1855. Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow National Historic Site.
These details come from a letter Felton wrote the next day to Sumner in Washington; he had presumably pieced them together from the reports of the servants, the doctor, perhaps the police. Felton was not certain which of the children were in the house, or how much they had heard or seen during this rapid sequence of events, or how much information Longfellow himself was able to piece together immediately afterward. “She bore the agony like a martyr dying at the stake,” Felton wrote. Finally given ether, probably some hours after the accident, she sank into quiet but remained conscious through the night. In the morning of July 10 she asked for coffee, lost consciousness, and died at ten minutes after ten.
For many years, this was the “official” version of Fanny’s death, repeated by biographers and tourist guides alike as part of the legend of the Craigie House. It is a gripping story, even in its incompleteness, and it is reportedly the one thing about Longfellow (“his wife caught fire”) that young schoolchildren are sure to remember.
Around 1908, however, Richard Henry Dana III—the son of the seafaring writer and the husband of Longfellow’s daughter Edith—heard a different version of the story from the youngest daughter, Annie, who had become Mrs. Joseph Thorp. He had found a large folded paper in which two long curls of Edith’s hair had been preserved since that day. He took them that evening to Mrs. Thorp, who instantly recognized the packet, which she had not seen for more than fifty-seven years. She related her version of the accident to Dana.
Her mother that afternoon had been lying on a small sofa on the east side of the library. Because of the warm weather, she decided to cut Edith’s curls. When her daughter came downstairs, Fanny moved to a Spanish chair next to the window seat (where there is now a doorway) overlooking the piazza and garden. Five-year-old Annie sat to the right on the window seat, her feet not touching the ground; Edith was at her mother’s left. Annie began to play with a box of “parlor” matches—designed to ignite on any rough surface—putting them in and out of their box. One of these matches fell to the floor under Fanny’s white muslin dress. Annie slid down to pick it up, but either she or her mother stepped on it, causing the match to flare and the underside of the dress to catch fire.
The packet of hair had been folded but not yet sealed; the little candle used for such purposes had not even been lit. Fanny did not panic but walked through the passageway into her husband’s study. He was asleep in the big armchair to the left of the fireplace. She called out: “Henry!” He awoke, seized the hearth rug, wrapped it around her. He told Annie to run upstairs for the servants, who were on the third, or attic, floor. He took Fanny into the front hall, where she fainted at the foot of the stairs. The decorative oil cloth that covered the floor was marked by the still unextinguished flames. Longfellow ran in with the water-pitcher from the dining room. Servants helped carry Fanny upstairs to her bedroom
and began what proved a difficult search for a doctor. That was the last Edith and Anne Allegra saw of their mother. They were sent immediately to the Dana house on Berkeley Street, where they stayed until after the funeral. Alice had been out of the house, visiting the Spelmans’ daughters, when these events took place, and the two boys were at Nahant.
Dana added in his typed memorandum on this conversation, which is among his papers (along with the locks of hair) at the Massachusetts Historical Society: “Mr. Longfellow never spoke to his children about their mother’s death and the next Christmas they received presents marked as from their mother.” He went on to say: “Annie felt that it had been her fault and she used sometimes to say she had killed her mother. Her father had to tell her not to say that, that it was not so, that it was an accident, etc. It affected her, however, very much to think that she was to blame and she became so oppressed with this and so solemn that her father said, ‘I used to call you Allegra; I shall now call you Penserosa.’
“It is a strange fact that Edith told me that she thought that she was the one playing with the matches and felt that it was her fault, but Mrs. Thorp’s recollection is so clear and vivid and she so frequently said that it was her fault before others, that it seems as if her recollection must be better than Edith’s. Annie so distinctly remembers the box being near her, her dropping the match, and her slipping down from the seat to pick it up.”
Dana, a distinguished and fair-minded attorney, believed Mrs. Thorp’s account. “[H]er accurate description of the curls and just how the paper was folded, which she had not seen for 57 years, borne out absolutely by them when discovered, shows how vivid was her recollection.”
“Poor Longfellow: he was dreadfully but not fatally burned,” Felton reported to Sumner. “He has been under ether and laudanum ever since: wanders: thinks he is growing idiotic, begs not to be sent to an asylum: could not see Fanny when she was dying.” There had been very little the doctor could do to save her. According to a medical writer of the day, burn victims fell into two categories: those whose burns were superficial enough to be treated with salves or dressings, and those whose burns were so deep, there was nothing to do but try to ease their pain until they died.
She was buried at Mt. Auburn on July 13, the eighteenth anniversary of their wedding day. The funeral had been held at noon in the library—“the scene of so many pleasures, and of one awful tragedy,” Felton told Sumner—with her coffin on a table in the center, covered with flowers, white roses across her breast and a bridal-like wreath of orange blossoms around her head. Longfellow, still heavily sedated, was in bed and unable to attend. At the cemetery Felton pulled a rose from her coffin and enclosed a leaf of it to Sumner.
The coffin was at length closed, and I slowly walked away, oppressed by a weight of sorrow that no words can tell: yet filled with a sense of the soothing power of nature, the harmony of the scene with the character of Fanny, and the surpassing sweetness of every memory connected with her beautiful and happy life.
I have not seen Longfellow. He has seen no one yet out of his immediate family. I dread to think of him bereaved of Fanny: she was so perfect a companion of his daily existence, and sharer of his glory. But his children remain, and they must fill in part, her place. God help them all. The world henceforth will be strangely changed for him.
When Felton did see Longfellow four days later, he found him calm and reasonable and still suffering from his burns, especially on his hands, but he told his old friend that he slept best when the pain was greatest. Among the flood of letters, he read only a few, including those from Sumner and Hillard. A week later, his face was still too swollen for him to shave, but the burns on his nose and left cheek had healed, and by mid-August he was recuperating at Nahant. “How I am alive after what my eyes have seen, I know not,” he wrote to Fanny’s sister in London, in a long letter in pencil from “this haunted sea-shore. So strong is the sense of her presence upon me, that I should hardly be surprized to meet her in our favorite walk, or, if I looked up now to see her in the room.”
He worried about the children, who had suffered a double loss. After Fanny’s funeral, her eighty-year-old father, confined by poor health to 39 Beacon Street, sat for the rest of the day holding a lily brought to him from her coffin, saying, “She has gone but a little while before me.” A few days later he was buried beside her. The customary routines of life at the Craigie House eventually resumed, but Longfellow had the additional burden of being the only parent there. That summer, Charley was seventeen, Erny fifteen, Alice ten, Edith seven, and Annie five. In time Alice would grow into the role of mistress of the house and, to some degree, a surrogate mother for her sisters; she would in fact devote her life to this calling, never marrying, and taking on for herself curatorship of both her father’s memory and his Cambridge house. (On a more modest scale, his widowed sister Anne Pierce would perform a similar commemorative role in the Portland house.) Meanwhile, there were a governess and servants, to be sure, but the children’s hour had turned into a full day of responsibilities, followed by long nights of loneliness and grief.
CHARLEY GOES TO WAR
IT IS DIFFICULT TO KNOW to what degree, if any, Longfellow’s private sorrows were subsumed in the great national drama unfolding of secession and rebellion. Certainly Sumner kept him well informed of events in Washington. The unionist and pacifist hopes of some of his earlier poems having been crushed, Longfellow had already produced one rollicking nationalist war poem—“Paul Revere’s Ride,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1860, a year before the firing on Fort Sumter. He would go on to write some minor wartime lyrics, including the balladlike “Killed at the Ford,” with its image of a bullet flying from the battlefield and into the home and heart of the dead soldier’s loved one. But once again the events of the day failed to stir his poetic imagination, however deeply moved he may have been as a citizen (and he was moved, as numerous journal entries on the secession crisis and wartime politics attest). Nonetheless Longfellow threw himself into work, notably the extensive narratives of Tales of a Wayside Inn (published in three parts, starting in 1863) and his resumption of the massive project of translating The Divine Comedy.
Yet Felton was right in saying that he would find his world strangely changed. According to a much-publicized family tradition, Longfellow grew his beard to cover the scars left by his burns. This may be true. It certainly would have been difficult for him to shave in the weeks after the accident. Yet photographs of him from the mid 1860s on show no obvious scars, and the fullness of the beard suggests that it grew without the patchiness one would associate with permanently damaged skin. What is most dramatic in these images is the fact that he seems to have aged twenty years, as it were, overnight. The Longfellow of the 1850s is a dapper, erect, sleek-looking man in well-fed middle age, with a fashionable fringe of dark mutton-chop whiskers halfway down his cheeks. Longfellow from 1862 on is a grandfatherly figure, somewhat stooped, deeply wrinkled, hoary, almost woolly—at times looking utterly exhausted, yet on one occasion (the great portrait of him from 1868 by Julia Margaret Cameron) coming across as defiantly bardic. The beard may have been the most conscious symbol of this transformation, his badge of mourning, his announcement to the world that his accustomed life had ended with the death of Fanny. There was, at any rate, more tragedy to come: Felton, who in many ways was the most dependable, and certainly the most high-spirited, of Longfellow’s close friends from the old days, had become president of wartime Harvard. He died of overwork in 1865.
Meanwhile, in the motherless family at the Craigie House, there was a more immediate difficulty: what to do about Charley. The restlessness he had shown as a child had not diminished in late adolescence, and he showed little interest in his Harvard studies or in pursuing an Appleton-like career in State Street. He loved to sail, to shoot, to roam the countryside or the riverbanks. He seemed accidentprone; at age eleven at nearby Fresh Pond, his hunting rifle had misfired, blowing off his left thumb. Longfellow had good
reason to fear that he would volunteer for the army, as so many of his Beacon Hill contemporaries were doing. The exposure of his eldest child to mortal danger so soon after the family’s tragedy was more than Longfellow could bear. An opportunity presented itself in 1862 to give the boy a glimpse of the excitement of the war, from a safe distance, in the hopes perhaps of getting it out of his system. (This was still a time when well-informed people on both sides assumed the war would soon be over.) In March, Charley sailed on a supply vessel, the Parliament, owned by their friend William Fay, for Ship Island, the Gulf Coast staging point for the Union Army’s planned attack on New Orleans. As it turned out, Ship Island was a wind-swept, disease-ridden sandbar, but Longfellow did not know this and hoped that Charley might be satisfied at least to hear the noise of presumably distant guns. Charley, a splendid sailor, found the whole trip a wonderful lark. He sent back vivid descriptions of the crew, the duck shooting, the inefficiencies of military life, and the occasional sighting of a “secesher,” or Confederate. As he was to prove on other occasions, he was better at reportage than his father the writer. After one venture ashore on Ship Island, he sketched this scene of the commanding general’s wife:
We were then introduced to Mrs. [Benjamin] Butler in her little ten foot house which is furnished with rebel furniture captured on its way to New Orleans, the floor is covered with sand and the room is chock full of flies and there Mrs. B. sits in her glory and black silk dress languidly fanning herself and making rather flat remarks.
Aboard another vessel, he met another Northern female far from home. As he wrote back to the Craigie House, “we were introduced to a real live woman and it was very pleasant to se[sic] one after a month’s voyage I feel half in love with her although she is married as she is very pretty and only 19, her history is this, she enlisted as a private in the 15 Maine with her husband she was not discovered untill she had nearly got here when they did find her out they made her put on her own clothes and took her into the cabin where she is now staying.”
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