This week’s choice is A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and it is one of the poems performed by Jesse Gillespie who I mentioned last week.
Lives of great men all remind us
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807—1882)
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Poem 428. A Psalm of Life
What The Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
This poem expresses Longfellow’s musings on how to make the best of life. It was written shortly after the death of his first wife and he is evidently trying to rouse himself from his sorrow to make a new life.
The subtitle is “What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist” so it is to be taken as the thoughts of a youth reproving the staid and settled ways of an elderly psalmist (a composer of sacred songs). I infer the aged nature of the psalmist from the rather archaic nature of the profession.
The youth begins in a chiding tone: life is no hollow dream to be summed up in the numbers of hymns and psalms: an inert soul is as good as dead but things are never as bad as they appear to be. Life is for living “and the grave is not its goal”—we should not be preparing for death but living our lives however long or short they may be. Although the funeral service speaks of dust returning to dust, it is speaking of our physical bodies, not our spirit.
Longfellow’s youth argues that we should not be spending our days solely in hedonistic pleasure, nor in stoic grief—the thing is to act, to achieve something so that “each tomorrow/Find us farther than today.”
He invokes the old Latin maxim: “Ars longa, vita brevis”—“Art is long, and Time is fleeting” which is usually read as implying that creativity takes time though life is short. In this case, I think Longfellow suggests that our creations will outlive their creators, a reading that supports the young man’s argument. No matter how courageous our hearts, they all beat at the same rate and drum us to our graves but we should refuse to submit to being driven like cattle—we should forge our own path.
The youth urges us to disregard the blandishments of the future and to forget the dead past: the key moment is now, the only moment in which we can act and make a difference. Like the great men (and women) of the past, we too can leave our mark on the world—our “Footprints on the sands of time” that may eventually influence another to achieve some feat, even if it is as simple as regaining the courage and energy to act.
With that in mind, we should be working to “make our lives sublime” in whatever way we can, constantly achieving and then moving on to pursue the next thing.
I like it because it is a positive poem, and it encourages us to do what we can in life despite its many pitfalls and snares. It also seems to include a great many phrases that are very common though I don’t know if it is the originator of them or if Longfellow was just repeating ideas he had heard elsewhere: “Footprints on the sands of time”, “a heart for any fate”, and “Let the dead Past bury its dead”.
I chose this poem because I have been enjoying the musical settings of poems by Jesse Gillespie on his JG Literature YouTube channel, and this is one of them.