Poem of the Day: ‘Aftermath’
Longfellow’s phrases, like those of Shakespeare, have passed into such common parlance that nobody stops to consider that ships that pass in the night, for example, has a specific origin.
The poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), author of “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “The Song of Hiawatha,” and “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie,” hypnotized whole generations of nineteenth-century readers, who embraced Longfellow’s body of work as an original, thoroughly American mythology. People recited his poems at gatherings large and small. During his lifetime, schoolchildren celebrated his birthday. Characters from his poems, as well as the poet himself, became place names, names of public buildings and schools. His phrases, like those of Shakespeare, have passed into such common parlance that nobody stops to consider that ships that pass in the night, for example, has a specific origin. Today’s poem, “Aftermath,” however, grants us a glimpse of an introspective Longfellow. In two tetrameter seven-line stanzas, with an aabcccb rhyme scheme, the poem dwells on the quiet, sad, but ultimately fruitful disorder that descends on a wintering landscape.
Aftermath
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
When the summer fields are mown,
When the birds are fledged and flown,
And the dry leaves strew the path;
With the falling of the snow,
With the cawing of the crow,
Once again the fields we mow
And gather in the aftermath.
Not the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
Not the upland clover bloom;
But the rowen mixed with weeds,
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
In the silence and the gloom.
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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
