Longfellow and the Faith

 From Charles Coulombe:

In the latter half of the 19^th and the better part of the 20^th centuries, Longfellow was lumped in the popular mind with John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James Russell Lowell, and William Cullen Bryant as the so-called “Fireside Poets” – so called because their pleasant rhyme and metre and often sentimental treatment of even controversial topics lent themselves to home and school recitation. We have come a long way since poetry was considered popular entertainment! But at that time, these five were the first to rival English poets (even Lord Tennyson) in acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. At first glance these facts – and their common New England origin – would seem to be enough to warrant their being so grouped.

But Longfellow stands out from that crowd for two reasons: first, his afore-mentioned cosmopolitan interests. Even Hiawatha, although stitched together from various more-or-less authentic Indian legends, was set to the rhyme scheme of the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic. Fluent in Latin at an early age, his ease and joy in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian gave him a breadth of vision few Americans today could match, let alone his more provincial contemporaries.

This in turn allowed him to appreciate not merely European culture but the religion that had ultimately produced that culture in a way foreign to the other “Fireside Poets.” Certainly, his labors translating Dante had an effect on him, as may be seen in his cycle of six sonnets, “Divina Commedia.” These serve as a personal prelude to his edition of Dante, in which he likens the Florentine’s masterpiece to an ancient cathedral:

Oft have I seen at some cathedral door
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor
Kneel to repeat his paternoster o’er;
Far off the noises of the world retreat;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an undistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minster gate,
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away,
While the eternal ages watch and wait.

In a time when New England’s polite society regarded Catholic worship as mere superstition, this was a telling description. Although Longfellow, like most his friends, was a member of the Unitarian Church, he was fascinated by Jesus and orthodox Christianity’s claims for His divinity in a way that reminds one of Flannery O’Connor’s description of the South: to put it plainly, he was “Christ-haunted.” As early as 1849, he conceived a plan for a great cycle of poetry in three parts that he would call Christus: A Mystery. Although the second portion would actually appear first, in 1851, and the third eight years later, both were presented as independent and unrelated works: he finished the first section in 1871, and Christus finally appeared the following year as a complete work.

The first part of the cycle had given him enormous trouble for a very good reason; entitled “The Divine Tragedy,” it is a rendering of the public ministry of Christ as told in Gospels into verse, beginning with St. John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness. Culminating with His appearance to the Apostles in the boat after the Resurrection, its shocking – to a Unitarian audience – affirmation of orthodoxy finished with an epilogue wherein each of the twelve Apostles offers a line from the Apostles’ Creed. The “Divine Tragedy” then closes out with an epilogue featuring Joachim of Flora preaching his apocalyptic views. (Read more.)

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