The World's Best Poetry, Volume 5 (Part 1): Nature

One of the most remarkable distinctions post-Revolution America offered the world was its sense of returning humanity to nature. For all the advances in its industrial economic base, Longfellow’s America was still an agrarian, rural culture, such as Europe had long ago domesticated. For Longfellow, the exploration of nature—detailing its majesty, recording its stunning sensual impact, embracing the wonder of undeveloped pristine wilderness—was essential to his poetry and to any poetry seeking to represent America. Nature was an intrinsic element of American identity.

Despite its title, “Nature” is not about America’s vast natural frontier. Nature is less the physical environment of the New World (the sonnet here offers no descriptions of the American outdoors and instead takes place inside a home at bedtime) and more the embodiment of its gentle and coaxing spirit. In this, Longfellow reflects his historic context. Even as the Fireside poets were articulating the future doctrine of transcendentalism that celebrated the accessibility of nature in America, Longfellow here holds conversation with Nature. He recognized the spiritual argument that recast nature itself into an energy of redemption first posited by fellow Fireside poet Ralph Waldo Emerson.