A Psalm Of Life

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1838

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context

Given the biographical backstory that surrounds the drafting of the poem, it is tempting to define the poem from that narrow context. The young man in the poem determined to assert some purpose in a life that ends, always prematurely and always sorrowfully, by challenging the inherited wisdom of Christianity. This assertion can be read as a dialogue between Longfellow’s own two selves. Longfellow is grieving the death of his child and his young wife from the catastrophe of a miscarriage (the young man), unable to find comfort in the Christian religion of his upbringing (the psalmist).

Although the context of a personal tragedy gives the poem its emotional depth, that context cannot entirely account for the wide and immediate success the poem found in America. Inevitably the poem was taken as a clarion call to a young nation, still uncertain over its future, and still struggling, almost 50 years after winning independence, to emerge from the considerable shadow of England. The young man, then, becomes the voice of the new nation, defiant, hopeful, ambitious. The poem was embraced as a celebration of a new spirit of can-do, distinctly American optimism, the young man defying the glum psalmist and Christianity’s long tradition of passive endurance, as a joyful repudiation of the gloomy Puritan sense of determinism with its doleful gospel of life lived as patient endurance, a pessimism brought to the New World by those British ancestors.

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Within that historical context, the poem challenges Longfellow’s generation, the first generation born American citizens, to strive for greatness, to use the examples of the generation of the Revolution, now dying off, as template for their own achievements (the footprints in the sand that can, in turn, inspire the shipwrecked, that is those uncertain, anxious, hesitant). The poem then is a national hymn of heroic optimism, a call to pragmatic action, a reminder that the national experiment in democracy can succeed only by dint of hard work and commitment.

Literary Context

It is difficult for a contemporary audience in which serious poetry is an increasingly marginalized literary endeavor to appreciate the depth and reach of Longfellow’s stature. “A Psalm of Life” emerged as one of the earliest and boldest expressions of a confederacy of highly-educated poets and philosophers, gathered loosely around the Boston area, who became known collectively as the Fireside Poets, a reference to how, in becoming national fixtures, their works were read in parlors by families who found their works both engaging and inspiring. In turn, these poets, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, James Greenleaf Whittier, and William Cullen Bryant, were cultural celebrities, America’s first generation of literary lions, their works recited by schoolchildren, their status acknowledged by government decree, their funerals staged events.

The Fireside Poets sought to define a national literature by drawing on respected inherited models of British poetics, that is the discipline of tight meter and chiseled rhyme schemes, but to apply those traditional templates to American subjects written for American readers, a vast educated middle-class market, which a boom in magazine publication targeted. The Fireside Poets dismissed as extravagant folly the idea of poetry venting the private agonies or joys of an introspective (that is, Romantic) tormented poet-figure. Poetry had a public function, part of the national enterprise to drive forward a nation dismissed by most of the world as an aberration doomed to collapse of its own irony. Thus, the poetry endeavors to use the vehicle of easy-to-memorize rhythms and rhyme schemes to preach an accessible gospel message of aspiration and hope, soaring poetry that offered common sense decorated into rich aural settings. The goal, of course, was to earn international respect for the literature of a new nation widely perceived to be a rouge fluke-country of backwoods minimally-educated rubes and dirt farmers. Longfellow was the most prominent of the Fireside Poets. His long publishing career earned him, and by extension American culture itself, respect abroad, most notably in the reception his works enjoyed in England itself.