Henry Longfellow

"Look not mournfully into the past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future, without fear, and with a manly heart." This is a saying Longfellow read in Germany where his wife died. The words gave him hope for the future. It inspired him to want to write a series of psalms. The first one, "A Psalm of Life" written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, is an uplifting poem that compels us to feel hope for the future. After reading it the first time it had a powerful effect on me. Surprisingly, he wrote this poem few months after his first wife died. Longfellow took his wife's death and interpreted it as a sign to look at life as fleeting and it passes quickly. I feel that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, after his wife's death, had an optimistic view on life in the poem, "A Psalm of Life".

The second stanza seems to say that life is here and it must be lived. It is real and not just some dream. Line five supports this with the hopeful exclamation that "Life is real! Life is earnest!" In the next line he says "And the grave is not its goal". Longfellow feels you don't live to die. Death is not the point of living a just life. Lastly in this stanza, he states, "Dust thou art, o dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul". Our bodies will turn to dust but the soul will live on. He feel there is an afterlife and we are here forever in spirit. But what we do with our time on earth is what makes us eternal because we are remembered for how we lived our lives. (Lines 5-8, pg. 302)

In the fifth stanza Longfellow advises the reader to fight and to be active rather than sitting around in a passive way. We are told to "trust no future" because we don't know what the future holds. We are to "act in the living present" because it is the here and now that is important and we must be concerned with worrying that the future will revisit us with the pain and suffering of our past. We are not to live in the past for being stuck in the past will get you nowhere. Then in the sixth stanza, Longfellow tells to be reminded of the "lives of great men" because "we can make our lives sublime". This shows we should look at the heroes