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Tales Of A Wayside Old By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

661 Words3 Pages

Most poets are like the flowers that the love to write about- they bud, bloom, and die in popularity. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow does not follow this pattern. Longfellow’s use of rhythm and rhyme in his works “The Landlord’s Tale”, “The Arsenal at Springfield” and “A Psalm of Life”, invoke a sense of urgency, immediacy, and danger, as well as a sense of grandness, and impressive scale. First, in “The Landlord’s Tale”, part of Longfellow’s larger work “Tales of a Wayside Inn”, Longfellow tells the story of Paul Revere’s Midnight ride. As is the case with many of his epic poems, “The Landlord’s Tale” is written in a combination of Iambic and Anapestic meter, and utilizes a shifting stanza size. Dan Gioia states that Longfellow wrote this poem “At a crucial time in American History-just as the Revolutionary war receded from living memory and the disastrous Civil War inexorably approached” (1). “The Landlord’s Tale” was Henry …show more content…

In this poem, Daniel Littlefeild posits that Longfellow brought “the wisdom of many ages and nations into focus in shaping a personal philosophy” (4). This poem of Longfellow’s wisdom to the next generation, became hugely popular, because of his energetic delivery of advice, and because of the uplifting, and for lack of a better word, self-empowering nature of that advice. He exhorts the reader to “Be not like dumb, driven cattle! / Be a hero in the strife!”. By contrasting the image of cattle, driven to slaughter, and the image of a hero on a battlefield, Longfellow is showing the two possible outcomes of any interaction with a woman that one loves. In telling the reader to not be like the cattle, Longfellow is implying that his love for Frances Appleton was not reciprocated, and therefore he felt like he was like an individual in the metaphorical cattle

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