English and American Poetry I Analysis ‘A Salm of Life’

ANALYSIS ON 'A PSALM OF LIFE'

Longfellow's “A Psalm of Life” was first published in The Knickerbocker, a New York magazine, in
1838. A year later, the poem was included in Longfellow's first major collection of poetry, Voices of
the Night (1839). Readers were immediately drawn to the poem's inspirational message, and 'A
Psalm of Life' contributed to Longfellow's rapidly growing popularity. Between 1848 and 1882, the
poem was translated into various languages, including Chinese and Russian.

Some of the reasons that the poem fell out of critical favor are its simplicity, straightforwardness,
and its rather outdated mindset that characterizes a young and ambitious nation. The 'Psalm', as
the epigraph says, is the words issuing from 'the heart of a young man'.

The identity of the speaker is not revealed. Longfellow is clearly adopting the personality of a
'young man'. Despite that, the poet struggled to come to terms with the death of his wife in 1835,
and he wrote that he 'had kept [the poem] some time in manuscript, unwilling to show it to any one,
it being a voice from my inmost heart, at a time when I was rallying from depression. While Old
Testament psalms are often prayers or laments to God, Longfellow's 'A Psalm of Life' is curiously
addressed to another psalmist, one whose grave character is foreign to the Biblical examples.

Furthermore, the young man of the 'Psalm' does not ask for help from his interlocutor, but, instead,
he looks to himself. In this way, Longfellow's 'A Psalm of Life' is a quintessentially Romantic
document –one where the search for salvation is carried out within the depths of oneself more
than through 'God overhead'.

Longfellow's 'A Psalm of Life' belongs to the genre of lyrical poetry, particularly to that 'subgenre'
called carpe diem poems. The Latin term coined by Horace in one of his odes means, 'Seize the day
and place no trust in tomorrow'. Longfellow makes an earnest appeal to his readers not to worry
about the past or fantasize about the future but to take maximum advantage of the present to
achieve something valuable and worthwhile.

Regarding the metrical pattern, the opening stanza of Longfellow's poem starts with a strong
trochaic rhythm which is kept up all through the rest of the text. The function of the trochees is also
immediately explained. The trochaic rhythm is contrasted to the 'mournful numbers' of the usual
sad, melancholic type of poetry. By the help of the 'numbers – slumbers' rhyme, this type of poetry
is associated with monotony, with a passive attitude, with the slumbering of the soul. Instead of this
attitude the speaker recommends a more active one, which is also represented by the powerful and
energetic trochees.

This theme, as well as the trochaic rhythm, is so strongly established in the first two lines of the
poem that the confusion that emerges in the metrical arrangement of the last two lines of the
stanza comes as a surprise. The first two lines are unambiguously trochaic with a catalectic foot in
the second: 'Tell me not, in mournful numbers / Life is but an empty dream!'. In the third we might
have some doubt whether the first foot should be construed as a trochee or as an anapest. Anapest
would sound more natural but we certainly do not have to force the natural accent of the language
too much to interpret the first foot as a trochee: 'For the soul is dead that slumbers'.

When it comes to the last line of the stanza, however, this system seems to break down completely.
The natural rhythm of the line goes so much against the abstract pattern that it would be a mistake
to impose a trochaic pattern on this obviously iambic/anapestic line: 'And things are not what they
seem'. What we can do in such a case is trying to find out why this change occurs and why it occurs
just here. And indeed, here we do not have to look very far for an explanation: the meaning of the

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English and American Poetry I Analysis ‘A Salm of Life’

very line in which the change occurs explains it. The change in the rhythm can be seen as
demonstrating what the line says: 'things are not what they seem'.

The poem is written in nine stanzas with a noticeable end rhyme scheme abab. Each of the stanzas
has four lines which make a quatrain. This strong and steady rhyming scheme contributes to the
poet's deep conviction of what he tries to convey.

Regarding syntax, the use of exclamation points and punctuation help to get his message across
and contribute to the sentence pattern, that results in each stanza enclosing a single sentence and
one idea.

In the opening stanza, the speaker directly addresses the psalmist. He begins by dismissing the
psalmist's sad poetry, and he rejects as dangerous the psalmist's notion that human life is a
meaningless illusion. If one accepts the logic that life is just a dream (a clear allusion to Calderón de
la Barca's play), he cautions, one's soul will not merely sleep, but die. On the surface, human life
may appear futile, but the speaker contends that it is actually this sense of hopelessness –and not
human life itself- that is the illusion.

Longfellow uses the second stanza to build on the ideas of the first. Because the soul lives eternally,
the speaker reasons, life must be real. Note that in the first line there is a caesura, or break, after
the word 'real' in an isocolon. This caesura forces the reader to pause, thereby emphasizing the idea
that life is real. These lines are an allusion to the Bible's book of Genesis, where God says to the
fallen Adam, 'dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return'. In Longfellow's poem, the speaker is
asserting that although the mortal body will die, the soul is exempt from death.

The third stanza introduces the central theme of the poem: the purpose of life is not to experience
pleasure or sorrow, but 'to act' -to perform the deeds that will improve the condition of mankind.
Note that by this point in the poem, the speaker has ceased to address the psalmist; instead, he is
directing his remarks to mankind in general, as in evidenced by his broadly inclusive use of the first-
person plural 'our' and 'as'.

The fourth stanza begins with an allusion to a line from Seneca's work De Brevitate vitae, which
states 'vita brevis est, ars longa', or 'Life is brief, art long'. The idea here is that although a lifetime
passes relatively quickly, it actually takes a long time to learn how to live well –to decipher the 'art'
of living. The speaker is suggesting with some urgency, then, that we should live as productive a life
as possible, because death (of the human body, not the soul) is always imminent.

Note the simile in line 15, which compares the human heartbeat to 'muffled drums'. On a literal
level, of course, a heartbeat can sound like a drumbeat, but Longfellow extends this idea to suggest
that our own hearts are measuring out the backbeat of a steady and irreversible journey toward
death. Each beat of our hearts, Longfellow implies, carries us closer to death. If the stanza is read
aloud, it will be noticed that, at this point, the trochaic rhythm is especially steady and even sounds
as though a drum is beating in the background.

Lines 17-20, introduced by paired anaphoras, rely heavily on war imagery, as the march to the grave
has been transformed to a march to battle. By using the metaphor of life as a 'bivouac', a temporary
campsite during a battle, the speaker reminds us again of the transience of human existence. He
exhorts the reader –who, by implication, is a soldier- to become a hero in this battle and, with a
simile, not merely march to his or her death as cattle driven to the slaughterhouse.

In the sixth stanza, the speaker explains in detail how the reader can become a hero. He strongly
advises the reader with imperatives not to hope for the future nor to worry about the past. Instead,

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English and American Poetry I Analysis ‘A Salm of Life’

in a return to the poem's theme, he urges the reader to live actively in the present. The speaker in
line 23 uses again imperatives and epizeuxis and draws our attention to the word 'act' by
manipulating the meter (a spondaic foot) -not only does he insert a caesura between the two 'acts',
but, metrically, the two consecutive words are stressed, giving them added force.

In the seventh stanza, the speaker asks the reader to consider past heroes. These 'great men', the
speaker indicates, should inspire us to live our lives so fully that we, too, will leave behind records of
greatness when we die. Longfellow suggests the idea of a greatness by using a beautiful metaphor:
'footprints on the sands of time'. Even here, however, this metaphor ironically reminds us of the
transient nature of life, since these footprints will eventually be washed away by the tide.
Nonetheless, they may have a positive effect on the people who live after us.

In stanza #8, the 'footprints' metaphor of the seventh stanza develops into the central conceit, or
governing concept of the present stanza. The speaker introduces a new image –a shipwrecked
'human being' who is lost at the sea but observes these footprints in the sand. In this conceit, the
sailor represents any discouraged or lonely individual who receives encouragement from the
memory of the good deeds of others.

The speaker concludes the poem with the ninth stanza by exhorting us to live active, courageous
lives. He is urging the reader to strive continuously to accomplish good, useful deeds –these good
deeds, it is suggested, give life meaning and purpose. The isocolon in line 35 insists on the idea of
keeping on 'living actively'.

The last word of the poem, 'wait', has a few possible meanings; it can mean 'to serve' others- in this
case, by working or 'laboring' diligently; it can mean 'to be ready' for someone or some event; or it
can mean to be 'watchful'-to be on the lookout for good opportunities as well as to be on guard
against unexpected events or dangers. The poem ends, then, as it began, with a word of caution
and of hope.

Modern criticism has censured Longfellow not only for what is now considered a condescending
attitude towards his audience, but also for 'the platitudes (clichés) and generalizations out of which
the psalms are made'. Thus, it could be concluded that the poem has a somber and sullen reflection
on death because of the use of terms found in biblical psalms such as 'mournful', 'empty', 'dead',
'grave', 'sorrow', 'end', 'fleeting', 'funeral' and 'departing'. But the poem has been popularly used as
one of the most encouraging compositions on the achievement of goals as one should live life
seizing the present.

As critic Dana Gioia asserts in her essay 'Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism', 'Psalm of Life
fails as lyric poetry because it belongs to a different genre, inspirational didactic verse'. Longfellow's
poem acquires more value for the way it teaches about life than the style itself as a poem.