In September 2009, not long after Senator Ted Kennedy had died, 91-year old Senator Robert Byrd, who had been quite ill, spoke on the Senate floor about his late colleague.
“Not very ago, I picked up a book of poetry which Ted Kennedy had given to me in July 1996,” said the ailing Byrd, who had not spoken in the Senate for several months. “It bore this inscription: ‘To Bob, the master of our legislative poetry, who has already left so many extraordinary footprints on the sands of time.’ After that, Ted had written, ‘see page 371.'”
Byrd paused to collect himself, and then said, “I close with a few stanzas from ‘A Psalm of Life,’ from page 371 from the book that Ted Kennedy gave to me.
‘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.'”
Byrd went on to read a few more verses from the poem, which was written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, a 1-cent stamp issued on February 16, 1940 that was part of the 35-stamp “Famous Americans” series.
Byrd’s recitation was a reminder that there was a time when everyone knew some of Longfellow’s poetry by heart. In a 2002 talk, for example, Kennedy, said that one of his earliest memories “was being required by my mother to memorize the poem, ‘The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere’…She felt, and how right she was, that Longfellow’s poem was a wonderful way for her children to learn about poetry and history at the same time. That early exposure to our nation’s history and literature had…an immeasurable impact on my life.”
Kennedy put the poem to good use, quoting it from memory when the Senate Appropriations Committee, which Byrd chaired for many years, was considering Kennedy’s request for federal funds to renovate Longfellow’s house in Cambridge, which is owned by the National Park Service. (The house is also where George Washington lived when he first took command of American troops.) Byrd, in response, supposedly quoted the poem back, also by memory.
For all his popularity – or perhaps because of his popularity – Longfellow’s reputation among critics, particularly as the years have gone on, is, had been greatly diminished. “Rarely has so respected a writer been so discredited by posterity,” wrote literary historian Lawrence Buell. Historian Jill Lepore quoted Buell in a terrific 2011 essay in the American Scholar on Longfellow where she also noted: “feeble is a word you often see, describing Longfellow’s poetic gifts. Where was the ambiguity, the paradox, the difficulty, the anxiety, the obscurity? What good was a poem that was easy?”
“Shooting down Longfellow’s greeting-card verse,…has been, for modernist critics, nothing more demanding than target practice on a lazy afternoon, where the target is as big as Longfellow’s much-visited and palatial Cambridge mansion,” she added later in the piece. “‘Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music,’ Van Wyck Brooks wrote in 1915. Lewis Mumford said that Longfellow could be cut out of American literary history and no one would miss him or even notice. T. E. Lawrence once joked that Ezra Pound was Longfellow’s grandnephew, and he didn’t mean that as a compliment.”
The irony, in part, is that while Longfellow deliberately wrote accessible verse and shunned controversy, he also was a serious scholar who could speak eight language, produced a highly regarded translation of Dante’s work, and filled his poems with classical illusions. And while he shunned politics, he followed it closely. Indeed, he was close to Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts whose speech attacking slavery led to another notable attack in the capital – Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina beating Sumner so badly with his cane that the senator took three years to recover from his injury.
Viewed in this light, Lapore argued, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” is more than just a nice item for schoolchildren and senators to recite in service of faux patriotism. Rather, she contended, the piece, which was published in late 1860, after Lincoln was elected and just as South Carolina seceded from the union, “is a poem about waking the dead. The dead are Northerners, roused to war. But the dead are also the enslaved, entombed in slavery.
“Neglecting Longfellow, taking the Sumner out of Longfellow, juvenilizing Longfellow, has had its costs,” added Lepore, who noted that at his editor’s suggestion Longfellow cut what had been the poem’s last stanza so that it instead ends:
“In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The People will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beat of his steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.”
Yes, Longfellow can seem trite. But focusing on the trite risks losing the deeper meaning. If you watch Byrd’s Senate speech-which is worth finding-you get the sense that Byrd, who at times could be unctuous and unappealing, was speaking from the heart when he recited the closing stanzas of “A Psalm of Life.”
“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.”
Read today, more than a decade after Kennedy’s death, and read today in the light of another horrific assault in the capital, those words carry much more weight than Longfellow’s many critics seem willing to acknowledge.
Be well, atay safe, “be up and doing,” fight for justice, and work for peace.