Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - The Village Blacksmith

 The Village Blacksmith

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

Under a spreading chestnut-tree

     ⁠The village smithy stands;

The smith, a mighty man is he,

     With large and sinewy hands,

And the muscles of his brawny arms

     Are strong as iron bands.

His hair is crisp, and black, and long;

     His face is like the tan;

His brow is wet with honest sweat,

     He earns whate'er he can,

And looks the whole world in the face,

     For he owes not any man.

Week in, week out, from morn till night,

     You can hear his bellows blow;

You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,

     With measured beat and slow,

Like a sexton ringing the village bell,

     When the evening sun is low.

And children coming home from school

     Look in at the open door;

They love to see the flaming forge,

     And hear the bellows roar,

And catch the burning sparks that fly

     Like chaff from a threshing-floor.

He goes on Sunday to the church,

     And sits among his boys;

He hears the parson pray and preach,

     He hears his daughter's voice

Singing in the village choir,

     And it makes his heart rejoice.

It sounds to him like her mother's voice

     Singing in Paradise!

He needs must think of her once more,

     How in the grave she lies;

And with his hard, rough hand he wipes

     A tear out of his eyes.

Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing,

     Onward through life he goes;

Each morning sees some task begin,

     Each evening sees it close;

Something attempted, something done,

     Has earned a night's repose.

Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,

     For the lesson thou hast taught!

Thus at the flaming forge of life

     Our fortunes must be wrought;

Thus on its sounding anvil shaped

     Each burning deed and thought.

 “The Village Blacksmith” by Currier & Ives, 1968 via Amazon

In Context

by M.E. Bond

The Original Manuscript

“The Village Blacksmith” was first published in Knickerbocker magazine in November 1840. It appeared in a book of Longfellow’s collected poems the following year. 

Original draft of “The Village Blacksmith” via The Library of Congress: American Memory

The Library of Congress: American Memory record for the document states:

“This manuscript was donated to the Library of Congress in 1942 by collector Francis Joseph Hogan (1877-1944), a Washington, D.C., attorney. It is written in ink on two sides of one sheet, with the last stanza appearing on a segment of an additional sheet which had been lengthened to match the first, probably before donation. A Library of Congress conservator has identified the paper as wove cotton or linen, machine-made, by Ames Paper Company, Springfield, Massachusetts, whose embossing appears in the upper-left corner of both sheets.”

Who Was the Longfellow's Blacksmith?

In my research I came across two candidates for the blacksmith who inspired the poem. The first is Dexter Pratt, who lived and worked near Longfellow’s home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wikipedia backs this man, citing Literary Trail of Greater Boston (Houghton Mifflin, 2000).

However, in an obituary of April 7, 1910, The Daily Times calls Thaddeus W. Tyler the “original smithy.” (We’ll have to ignore the fact that the smithy was the building, while the man was called the smith.)

The Gulf Coast Blacksmith Association also states that Tyler was the inspiration behind the poem and provides a link to his obituary (this one from the Boulder Daily Herald).

So Who Was the Real “Village Blacksmith”?

In this debate I’ll have to side with Wikipedia because the Daily Herald obituary says that Tyler didn’t move to Massachusetts until 1844, four years after the poem was published. Moreover, another source (a record in the archives of the Maine Historical Society) calls Tyler “the apprentice of the ‘Village Blacksmith.’” Mystery solved.

The Original Tree

The “spreading chestnut tree” was also inspired by a real tree, which was cut down years later. On his 72nd birthday local children presented Longfellow with an armchair made of its wood. He then wrote them a poem, “From My Arm-Chair.”

Image via Cambridge Historical Society

Image via Gulf Coast Blacksmith Association

A Final Illustration

J. P. Davis & Speer illustration from ‘The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with numerous illustrations.’ Boston : Houghton, Mifflin and Company; James R. Osgood and Company, 1880. p. 38 via Maine Historical Society

Sources

• The Cambridge Historical Society

• Gulf Coast Blacksmith Association

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by the Maine Historical Society

• The Library of Congress: American Memory

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - The Children's Hour

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photographed
by Julia Margaret Cameron in 1868

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of the "Fireside Poets," wrote lyrical poems about history, mythology, and legend that were popular and widely translated, making him the most famous American of his day.

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Eastman Johnson, Christmas Time

Print of Thomas Buchanan Read's portrait of Longfellow's
three daughters, Alice, Edith and Anne Allegra

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Wikipedia - The poem describes the poet's idyllic family life with his own three daughters, Alice, Edith, and Anne Allegra:[1] "grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, and Edith with golden hair." As the darkness begins to fall, the narrator of the poem (Longfellow himself) is sitting in his study and hears his daughters in the room above. He describes them as an approaching army about to enter through a "sudden rush" and a "sudden raid" via unguarded doors. Climbing into his arms, the girls "devour" their father with kisses, who in turn promises to keep them forever in his heart.

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

Between the dark and the daylight,
    When the night is beginning to lower
Comes a pause in the day's occupations,
    That is known as the Children's Hour.

I hear in the chamber above me
    The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
    And voices soft and sweet.

From my study I see in the lamplight,
    Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
    And Edith with golden hair.

A whisper, and then a silence:
    Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
    To take me by surprise.

A sudden rush from the stairway,
    A sudden raid from the hall!
By three doors left unguarded
    They enter my castle wall!

They climb up into my turret
    O'er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape, they surround me;
    They seem to be everywhere.

They almost devour me with kisses,
    Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
    In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti,
    Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old mustache as I am
    Is not a match for you all!

I have you fast in my fortress,
    And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
    In the round-tower of my heart.

And there will I keep you forever,
    Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
    And moulder in dust away!

Fredrick Morgan, Which do you love best?

Fredrick Morgan, SeeSaw

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The Children’s Hour by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

https://poemanalysis.com/henry-wadsworth-longfellow/the-childrens-hour/

by Andrew Walker, Andrew

If you’ve ever tried to convey a sarcastic remark through a written medium, you probably already know how difficult it can be to convey tone through text. For poets, this can be a very difficult mechanic to employ, but a very powerful one at the same time — not because poets are sarcastic people, but because of how useful it can be to play with connotations and denotations and take advantage of a reader’s predispositions. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow proves himself, again and again, to be very adept at using tone to enhance the messages within his poem, and The Children’s Hour is an excellent example of his use of the tool to convey the idea of his titular phenomenon.

The Children’s Hour Analysis

Between the dark and the daylight,

When the night is beginning to lower,

Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,

That is known as the Children’s Hour.

–

I hear in the chamber above me

The patter of little feet,

The sound of a door that is opened,

And voices soft and sweet.

The Children’s Hour is written very lyrically, using the same rhythm and rhyming structure from beginning to end, without any kind of emphatic break or pause. The rhyme and flow helps the poem to pick up an easygoing kind of atmosphere — poems just sound nicer when they can essentially be sung. The first verse is also crucial in establishing atmosphere, and this seems to be its only read purpose. The grammatical structure of the verse is what is most interesting, specifically that there is no subject, and the entire verse is written in passive voice. It talks about a time and talks about a name, but gives no story or purpose to either; whose occupations are paused? Who calls this the Children’s Hour? Whose children are they? None of this is established, which makes the information presented sound just a little cryptic, and a lot like fact. It’s meant to be intriguing and disarming, and largely succeeds.

The second verse, on the other hand, has a narrator, who describes the early events of the Children’s Hour for the reader. The meaning of the verse is straightforward enough — the speaker can hear light footsteps and voices from people leaving the room above. Longfellow’s word choice is interesting though — he describes the “patter” and the “soft and sweet” voices, words typical of describing children, and he also describes their room as a “chamber,” which is more typical of a castle hall or dungeon than a nursery. The word is completely unneeded from a structural standpoint — “room” would have fit just as easily, if not more, since it would have made the line the same number of syllables as the first line of the previous verse. “Chamber” holds conflicting connotation with the rest of the verse, and this makes it what is likely a very intentional choice by the author.

From my study I see in the lamplight,

Descending the broad hall stair,

Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,

And Edith with golden hair.

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A whisper, and then a silence:

Yet I know by their merry eyes

They are plotting and planning together

To take me by surprise.

The second and third verses describe the children arriving to the speaker’s study, and they follow a similar structure in tone to the verses before them. Allegra is laughing, Edith is golden, and Alice is grave, and that last adjective is a truly odd one to find in the bunch. The children’s eyes are merry, yet they are plotting. What is interesting here is that these changes in description, these words that don’t belong, do not detract from the cheerful atmosphere; rather, the reader tries to imagine the words has having other meanings. It makes more sense to think that Alice is simply taking the plan very seriously than it does to imagine one of these children as being cold and serious. This is a triumph of The Children’s Hour’s tonal developments so early in the work.*

A sudden rush from the stairway,

A sudden raid from the hall!

By three doors left unguarded

They enter my castle wall!

–

They climb up into my turret

O’er the arms and back of my chair;

If I try to escape, they surround me;

They seem to be everywhere.

At this point in the poem, it’s fairly clear that the speaker’s children are the subjects of the work, so when Longfellow continues to describe their embrace as a fortress raid, the idea becomes endearing, rather than threatening. The tone of the work is influencing the reader’s perceived meaning of each word — so here, he uses many more words that might otherwise be considered dark additions to a story, such as “rush,” “raid,” “unguarded,” “wall,” “turret,” “escape,” and “surround.” There are a lot of them! But in this context, it’s more cute than threatening, and it seems that he may be describing events as they take place in the children’s minds, rather than the speaker’s own. It makes sense to think of young kids as imagining that they are invading a castle, and that the study chair is an outpost, with their parent as the object of a daring raid. In this context, the poem feels even more fun than previously.

They almost devour me with kisses,

Their arms about me entwine,

Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen

In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

–

Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti,

Because you have scaled the wall,

Such an old moustache as I am

Is not a match for you all!

After the children reach the study chair, the speaker begins to imagine themselves as a part of the children’s story. The reference to the Bishop of Bingen is somewhat obscure — in popular medieval legend, he was a cruel and unfair leader who’s tower was invaded by rats as punishment for a famine he did little to avoid or help his subjects through. The speaker, however, feels more confident than the Bishop, and warns his children that reaching the tower was the easy part and that there is one guard they cannot get past, namely their own father (judging from the self-described “old moustache”). He places himself within the story and calls them “banditti,” a group of outlaws befitting of their narrative.

I have you fast in my fortress,

And will not let you depart,

But put you down into the dungeon

In the round-tower of my heart.

–

And there will I keep you forever,

Yes, forever and a day,

Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,

And moulder in dust away!

Tonally, The Children’s Hour is much benefitted when the father of the children embraces their narrative, and the story in the final four verses becomes about embracing that story and making it a part of the poem itself. Of course, because this is the Children’s Hour, the father will not allow his children to leave the “fortress,” returning their affection and promising to love them forever, still using their own story as his means of doing so — the “round-tower of my heart” is a somewhat literal metaphor, but it works here. The image of the tower crumbling to dust is a sad image to end off the poem, because it more than likely symbolizes the death of the father, who is saying that not a day will go by in his life that he will not love his children. It is a very sweet adaptation of the love a father has for his children, which is almost certainly the inspiration of the poem. Alice, Edith, and Anne Allegra Longfellow are the name of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s first three children, a fact which makes the playful and childish narrative of The Children’s Hour much, much sweeter to contemplate.

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

https://poets.org/poet/henry-wadsworth-longfellow

1807–1882

read poems by this poet

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine—then still part of Massachusetts—on February 27, 1807, the second son in a family of eight children. His mother, Zilpah Wadsworth, was the daughter of a Revolutionary War hero. His father, Stephen Longfellow, was a prominent Portland lawyer and later a member of Congress.

After graduating from Bowdoin College, Longfellow studied modern languages in Europe for three years, then returned to Bowdoin to teach them. In 1831 he married Mary Storer Potter of Portland, a former classmate, and soon published his first book, a description of his travels called Outre Mer ("Overseas"). But in November 1835, during a second trip to Europe, Longfellow's life was shaken when his wife died during a miscarriage. The young teacher spent a grief-stricken year in Germany and Switzerland.

Longfellow took a position at Harvard in 1836. Three years later, at the age of thirty-two, he published his first collection of poems, Voices of the Night, followed in 1841 by Ballads and Other Poems. Many of these poems ("A Psalm of Life," for example) showed people triumphing over adversity, and in a struggling young nation that theme was inspiring. Both books were very popular, but Longfellow's growing duties as a professor left him little time to write more. In addition, Frances Appleton, a young woman from Boston, had refused his proposal of marriage.

Frances finally accepted his proposal the following spring, ushering in the happiest eighteen years of Longfellow's life. The couple had six children, five of whom lived to adulthood, and the marriage gave him new confidence. In 1847, he published Evangeline, a book-length poem about what would now be called "ethnic cleansing." The poem takes place as the British drive the French from Nova Scotia, and two lovers are parted, only to find each other years later when the man is about to die.

In 1854, Longfellow decided to quit teaching to devote all his time to poetry. He published Hiawatha, a long poem about Native American life, and The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems. Both books were immensely successful, but Longfellow was now preoccupied with national events. With the country moving toward civil war, he wrote "Paul Revere's Ride," a call for courage in the coming conflict.

A few months after the war began in 1861, Frances Longfellow was sealing an envelope with wax when her dress caught fire. Despite her husband's desperate attempts to save her, she died the next day. Profoundly saddened, Longfellow published nothing for the next two years. He found comfort in his family and in reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. (Later, he produced its first American translation.) Tales of a Wayside Inn, largely written before his wife's death, was published in 1863.

When the Civil War ended in 1865, the poet was fifty-eight. His most important work was finished, but his fame kept growing. In London alone, twenty-four different companies were publishing his work. His poems were popular throughout the English-speaking world, and they were widely translated, making him the most famous American of his day. His admirers included Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens, and Charles Baudelaire.

From 1866 to 1880, Longfellow published seven more books of poetry, and his seventy-fifth birthday in 1882 was celebrated across the country. But his health was failing, and he died the following month, on March 24. When Walt Whitman heard of the poet's death, he wrote that, while Longfellow's work "brings nothing offensive or new, does not deal hard blows," he was the sort of bard most needed in a materialistic age: "He comes as the poet of melancholy, courtesy, deference—poet of all sympathetic gentleness—and universal poet of women and young people. I should have to think long if I were ask'd to name the man who has done more and in more valuable directions, for America."

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More References

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/henry-wadsworth-longfellow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wadsworth_Longfellow

https://poets.org/poet/henry-wadsworth-longfellow#poet__works

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/henry-wadsworth-longfellow#tab-poems

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - Catawba Wine

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Catawba Wine

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1907-1882)

*Written on the receipt of a gift of Catawba wine

from the vineyards of Nicholas Longworth on the Ohio River.

    This song of mine
    Is a Song of the Vine,
To be sung by the glowing embers
    Of wayside inns,
    When the rain begins
To darken the drear Novembers. 

    It is not a song
    Of the Scuppernong,
From warm Carolinian valleys,
    Nor the Isabel
    And the Muscadel
That bask in our garden alleys. 

    Nor the red Mustang,
    Whose clusters hang
O'er the waves of the Colorado,
    And the fiery flood
    Of whose purple blood
Has a dash of Spanish bravado. 

    For richest and best
    Is the wine of the West,
That grows by the Beautiful River;
    Whose sweet perfume
    Fills all the room
With a benison on the giver. 

    And as hollow trees
    Are the haunts of bees,
Forever going and coming;
    So this crystal hive
    Is all alive
With a swarming and buzzing and humming. 

    Very good in its way
    Is the Verzenay,
Or the Sillery soft and creamy;
    But Catawba wine
    Has a taste more divine,
More dulcet, delicious, and dreamy. 

    There grows no vine
    By the haunted Rhine,
By Danube or Guadalquivir,
    Nor on island or cape,
    That bears such a grape
As grows by the Beautiful River. 

    Drugged is their juice
    For foreign use,
When shipped o'er the reeling Atlantic,
    To rack our brains
    With the fever pains,
That have driven the Old World frantic. 

    To the sewers and sinks
    With all such drinks,
And after them tumble the mixer;
    For a poison malign
    Is such Borgia wine,
Or at best but a Devil's Elixir. 

    While pure as a spring
    Is the wine I sing,
And to praise it, one needs but name it;
    For Catawba wine
    Has need of no sign,
No tavern-bush to proclaim it. 

    And this Song of the Vine,
    This greeting of mine,
The winds and the birds shall deliver
    To the Queen of the West,
    In her garlands dressed,
On the banks of the Beautiful River.

Catawba Wine by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Cincinnati, Ohio, Fountain Square - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow verse on wall nearby

Setting

Cincinnati Museum Center

http://library.cincymuseum.org/cincifaq.htm

How Did Cincinnati Come to be Known as the Queen City?

During the first forty years after its founding, Cincinnati experienced spectacular growth. By 1820, citizens, extremely proud of their city, were referring to it as The Queen City or The Queen of the West.

On May 4, 1819, Ed. B. Cooke wrote in the Inquisitor and Cincinnati Advertiser, "The City is, indeed, justly styled the fair Queen of the West: distinquished for order, enterprise, public spirit, and liberality, she stands the wonder of an admiring world."

In 1854, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote his poem, Catawba Wine, to memorialize the city's vineyards, especially those of Nicholas Longworth. The last stanza of the poem reads:

And this Song of the Vine,

This greeting of mine,
The winds and the birds shall deliver,
To the Queen of the West,
In her garlands dressed,
On the banks of the Beautiful River.

Introduction

http://host31.spidergraphics.com/jos/doc/Ode_to_Catawba_-_Short_Version.pdf

Nicolas Longworth was a self-made millionaire and attorney who had an avid interest in horticulture. Beginning as early as 1813, he started vineyards along the banks of the Ohio River, hiring German immigrants whose homeland work was similar. He first began with a grape called “Alexander”, but found that it was only palatable as a fortified wine. He also planted “Catawba” vines and made a table wine which met with some success with the German immigrants in the area. An accidental discovery in the 1840’a led him to produce, with the later help of instruction from French winemakers on the “methode champenoise”, a sparkling Catawba wine – which met with great success both locally and on the East Coast. By the 1850’s, Longworth was producing 100,000 bottles of sparkling Catawba a year and advertising nationally. In the mid-1850’s he sent a case to poet, Henry Longfellow, then living in New York City, who wrote this ode. Remember, when Longfellow refers to the “Beautiful River”, he is referring to the Ohio River, which begins in Pittsburgh and passes through Cincinnati and Louisville, Kentucky on its way to Mississippi.

Catawba (grape)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Catawba is a red American grape variety used for wine as well as juice, jams and jellies. The grape can have a pronounced musky or "foxy" flavor. Grown predominantly on the East Coast of the United States, this purplish-red grape is a likely cross of the Native American Vitis labrusca and Vitis vinifera. Its exact origins and parentage are unclear but it seems to have originated somewhere on the East coast from the Carolinas to Maryland.

Catawba played an important role in the early history of American wine. During the early to mid-19th century, it was the most widely planted grape variety in the country and was the grape behind Nicholas Longworth's acclaimed Ohio sparkling wines that were distributed as far away as California and Europe.

Catawba is a late-ripening variety, ripening often weeks after many other labrusca varieties and, like many vinifera varieties, it can be susceptible to fungal grape diseases such as powdery mildew.