By the shore of Gitchie Gumee,
 By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
 At the doorway of his wigwam,
 In the pleasant Summer morning,
 Hiawatha stood and waited.
 All the air was full of freshness,
 All the earth was bright and joyous,
 And before him through the sunshine,
 Westward toward the neighboring forest
 Passed in golden swarms the Ahmo,
 Passed the bees, the honey-makers,
 Burning, singing in the sunshine.
    Bright above him shown the heavens,
 Level spread the lake before him;
 From its bosom leaped the sturgeon,
 Sparkling, flashing in the sunshine;
 On its margin the great forest
 Stood reflected in the water,
 Every tree-top had its shadow,
 Motionless beneath the water.
    From the brow of Hiawatha
 Gone was every trace of sorrow,
 As the fog from off the water,
 And the mist from off the meadow.
 With a smile of joy and triumph,
 With a look of exultation,
 As of one who in a vision
 Sees what is to be, but is not,
    Stood and waited Hiawatha.

from ‘The Song of Hiawatha’, 1855.

I can think of no other example of a poet making a particular metre his own as comprehensively as did Longfellow with the publication of ‘Hiawatha’. Often belittled and even more often parodied, the poem’s sheer ubiquity is a tribute to the compositional genius of the poet.

— Thomas

[On Hiawatha]

One of [Longfellow’s] most recognizable works is The Song of Hiawatha, based on an accumulation of American Indian stories and legends. Much of this work was based on The Myth of Hiawatha compiled by Jane and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Henry was a historian, explorer, and geologist who was superintendent of Indian affairs for Michigan from 1836 to 1841. Jane was an Ojibway indian whose name translated into english as ‘The Woman of the Sound Which the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky’. The Ojibway, and northwestern Michigan, would serve most of a century later as the background for Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories (a character who bears several parallels to Hiawatha).

– Steve Spanoudi, the Poet’s Corner: www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems

Biography

b. Feb. 27, 1807, Portland, Mass. [now in Maine], U.S. d. March 24, 1882, Cambridge, Mass.

Longfellow attended private schools and the Portland Academy. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825. At college he was attracted especially to Sir Walter Scott’s romances and Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, and his verses appeared in national magazines. He was so fluent in translating that on graduation he was offered a professorship in modern languages provided that he would first study in Europe.

On the continent he learned French, Spanish, and Italian but refused to settle down to a regimen of scholarship at any university. In 1829 he returned to the United States to be a professor and librarian at Bowdoin. He wrote and edited textbooks, translated poetry and prose, and wrote essays on French, Spanish, and Italian literature, but he felt isolated. When he was offered a professorship at Harvard, with another opportunity to go abroad, he accepted and set forth for Germany in 1835. On this trip he visited England, Sweden, and The Netherlands. In 1835, saddened by the death of his first wife, whom he had married in 1831, he settled at Heidelberg, where he fell under the influence of German Romanticism.

In 1836 Longfellow returned to Harvard and settled in the famous Craigie House, which was later given to him as a wedding present when he remarried in 1843. His travel sketches, Outre-Mer (1835), did not succeed. In 1839 he published Voices of the Night, which contained the poems “Hymn to the Night,” “The Psalm of Life,” and “The Light of the Stars” and achieved immediate popularity. That same year Longfellow published Hyperion, a romantic novel idealizing his European travels. In 1841 his Ballads and Other Poems, containing such favourites as “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Village Blacksmith,” swept the nation. The antislavery sentiments he expressed in Poems on Slavery (1842), however, lacked the humanity and power of John Greenleaf Whittier’s denunciations on the same theme. Longfellow was more at home in Evangeline (1847), a narrative poem that reached almost every literate home in the United States. It is a sentimental tale of two lovers separated when British soldiers expel the Acadians (French colonists) from what is now Nova Scotia. The lovers, Evangeline and Gabriel, are reunited years later as Gabriel is dying.

Longfellow presided over Harvard’s modern-language program for 18 years and then left teaching in 1854. In 1855, using Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s two books on the Indian tribes of North America as the base and the trochaic metrics of the Finnish epic Kalevala as his medium, he fashioned The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Its appeal to the public was immediate. Hiawatha is an Ojibwa Indian who, after various mythic feats, becomes his people’s leader and marries Minnehaha before departing for the Isles of the Blessed. Both the poem and its singsong metre have been frequent objects of parody.

– EB

Links

The complete Song of Hiawatha is available online at http://www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/hiawatha.html

Longfellow’s other famous poem is Paul Revere’s Ride, at poem #172

My favourite Hiawatha parody is, without a question, Lewis Carroll’s brilliant ‘Hiawatha’s Photographing’, which you can read at
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~bhs2u/carroll/hia.html