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Hiawatha (excerpt)
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When Longfellow wrote The Song of Hiawatha, from which I’ve taken a passage for our Poem of the Week, it was beloved at once, and that in itself is telling, isn’t it? It reminds me of an account I read in The Century, by one of the boys who went as a group to visit Longfellow in his home in Cambridge. The day was February 27, 1882, a Monday, so it must have been after school was out, and the sky would have been getting dark. But they had to visit him on that day, because it was the poet’s 75th birthday. They wanted to wish him a Happy Birthday, and to tell him how much they loved his poems. Longfellow, always fond of children, invited the boys in for tea and scones, and they spent an hour or so with the great man, talking about poetry and other boyish things. That was Longfellow’s last; he died a few weeks later.
That story seems incredible, doesn’t it? It’s as if it came from another world, one in which poetry is near to the hearts of ordinary people, especially to boys if the poetry celebrates the hero, as the gentle but brave Longfellow so often did. It was also a world in which you could have the run of your city if you were eleven or twelve years old. Nor was there so great a chasm set between the child and the old man. That story warms my heart.
There are a couple of things, too, about The Song of Hiawatha that suggest to me a kind of scholarly heroism. For Longfellow, at age 18, was offered a job teaching modern languages — that is, their literature — at his alma mater, Bowdoin College. But to do that, Longfellow determined that he had to travel to Europe to immerse himself in the languages, and so he did; in fact, all his life long he seems never to have stopped learning languages. He came back well-versed in German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, and of course he’d have studied Latin and Greek in school. He’d go on to learn Old Norse to read the great sagas of the Norse gods and the giants; and it’s from the Finnish epic Kalevala that he got his inspiration for Hiawatha and also its metrical form: regular unrhymed trochaic lines of four feet, DA-da-DA-da-DA-da-DA-da. It fits well with the polysyllabic names in the Huron languages, as for example HI-a-WA-tha.
That’s not all, though. Longfellow believed that beauty and nobility are to be found in all human cultures, even those that we’d otherwise look on as savage; and he thought, too, that God had granted to such people some strong hints of his existence, and even of man’s redeemer, Christ. That’s what Tolkien, talking with his friend the still-agnostic C. S. Lewis, and thinking of the pagan Germanic poetry and legends they both loved, called “good dreams.” Tolkien wasn’t going to confuse them with revelation, but what he said seemed to Lewis to open up the world: it was not all darkness, then. Longfellow seems to have harbored that sense too. He didn’t just invent The Song of Hiawatha out of his own head. It came from the work of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, historian and geologist, who collected the myths and legends of the Indian tribes of North America; or I should say from Schoolcraft as assisted by his wife, Jane Johnston, whose Indian name was the delightful O-bah-bahm-wawa-ge-zhe-go-qua (The Woman of the Sound Which the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky).
Here’s the setup for the passage. Because Hiawatha — think here of the young King Solomon — has prayed not for victory in battle, or renown among the warriors, or for greater skill in hunting and fishing, but for “profit of the people, / For advantage of the nations,” he will be given the chance to prove his heroism by self-sacrifice, endurance, strength, and courage. The young and handsome god Mondamin, a friend to man, dressed in yellow and green, appears to Hiawatha and instructs him to fast for seven days. On the evening of each of these days, Mondamin comes to wrestle with Hiawatha, till on the seventh day our hero is exhausted, and his grandmother Nokomis is afraid for his life. But Mondamin gives him instructions: when he wins the match and Mondamin dies, Hiawatha is to strip him, bury him in the earth, tend the grave, and to keep the ravens away. Here is what happens.
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And victorious Hiawatha Made the grave as he commanded, Stripped the garments from Mondamin, Stripped his tattered plumage from him, Laid him in the earth, and made it Soft and loose and light above him; And the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah, From the melancholy moorlands, Gave a cry of lamentation, Gave a cry of pain and anguish! Homeward then went Hiawatha To the lodge of old Nokomis, And the seven days of his fasting Were accomplished and completed. But the place was not forgotten Where he wrestled with Mondamin; Nor forgotten nor neglected Was the grave where lay Mondamin, Sleeping in the rain and sunshine, Where his scattered plumes and garments Faded in the rain and sunshine. Day by day did Hiawatha Go to wait and watch beside it; Kept the dark mould soft above it, Kept it clean from weeds and insects, Drove away, with scoffs and shoutings, Kahgahgee, the king of ravens. Till at length a small green feather From the earth shot slowly upward, Then another and another, And before the Summer ended Stood the maize in all its beauty, With its shining robes about it, And its long, soft, yellow tresses; And in rapture Hiawatha Cried aloud, “It is Mondamin! Yes, the friend of man, Mondamin!” Then he called to old Nokomis And Iagoo, the great boaster, Showed them where the maize was growing, Told them of his wondrous vision, Of his wrestling and his triumph, Of this new gift to the nations, Which should be their food forever. And still later, when the Autumn Changed the long, green leaves to yellow, And the soft and juicy kernels Grew like wampum hard and yellow, Then the ripened ears he gathered, Stripped the withered husks from off them, As he once had stripped the wrestler, Gave the first Feast of Mondamin, And made known unto the people This new gift of the Great Spirit.
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