By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most popular and influential American poets of the nineteenth century. Longfellow (1807-82) is best-known for The Song of Hiawatha, and for growing a beard to hide the marks of a family tragedy, but he also wrote many other celebrated poems.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Thou hast taught me, Silent River! / Many a lesson, deep and long; / Thou hast been a generous giver; / I can give thee but a song.’ 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.
‘To the River Charles’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
River! that in silence windest
Through the meadows, bright and free,
Till at length thy rest thou findest
In the bosom of the sea!
Four long years of mingled feeling,
Half in rest, and half in strife,
I have seen thy waters stealing
Onward, like the stream of life.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The US poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82) is best-known for The Song of Hiawatha, and for growing a beard to hide the marks of a family tragedy, but he also wrote many other celebrated poems. And then there’s ‘The Rainy Day’, which isn’t numbered among his most famous. But it is one of the finest poems written about rain, so deserves a few words of analysis for that reason alone.
The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.
My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.