The ship, as all man-made things do, would eventually wear out and come to a wrecked end. If the poem ended there it’d remain a curio of interest to scholars today, a romance in a European style adapted with distinctive American details and accomplished in English verse with a difficult rhyming scheme that never grates or seems fake, the sort of thing that is easier to do in French or Italian.*** But Longfellow had an envoi of sorts. After many supple verse lines detailing the construction of this ship,** it’s complete and it launches with a epithalamium in which the new and lovely ship is embraced as a bride by the timeless, older, gray sea. While building the ship, the apprentice and the master ship builder’s daughter fall in love, and the old master promises that on the day the ship launches his daughter and the apprentice will be wed. The entire “The Building of the Ship” is an allegorical story of a venerable ship builder* who with the help of a crew including a younger apprentice builds a ship for a merchant, more magnificent than any the builder has ever built. It comes at the end of a much longer poem Longfellow published in 1850, one that less than nobody reads today. Have I forgotten to talk about Longfellow’s poem? No, this is another poem for our July 4 th series. The best-selling author blew off a meeting with his publisher to hear them all.
We don’t know all Vassall told Longfellow about the house Longfellow now lived in, but the stories must have been interesting. He looked like a gentleman Darby later recounted, but “He was no gentleman.” Now that’s an Independence Day story! He was swinging on the gate of the very house Longfellow now lived in, a time-honored childhood pastime then and now (see also sutures and Colles’ fracture.) General Washington, impressively tall for his time, and like the house’s absent owners, a rich slaveholder who traveled with an enslaved manservant, asked the boy if he would like to work for the new occupant, this man who’d become so honored and famous that people even now buy his portrait for something between 25 cents and a dollar.ĭarby kept swinging, sizing up the tall white man, and then asked “How much are you paying?” Darby says Washington kind of lost interest in the conversation at that point-because, you know, slavery. There he was, six years old, and the revolution had by accident empirically freed him.
Washington left his short-term smaller quarters and went to the big house to move in.Īnd here’s the story Darby Vassall liked to tell about meeting The Father of Our Country. This left the house available for the new Revolutionary Army’s commander, General Washington, as spoils of war. When the Revolution came, his masters sided with the British, and so after the Battle of Bunker Hill, the owners skedaddled off to safer British-controlled territory. The man’s name was Darby Vassall, and this was the nature of his birth: he was born to enslaved Afro-Americans owned by the owners of that big house, which made him a slave by law from birth. In 1855, an elderly man visited that house where he had been born in 1769, meeting with Longfellow there. George Washington lived here, and later so did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. After all, when he was born in 1817, many who celebrated July 4 th were around for the July 4 th! And for much of his life Longfellow lived in a house that George Washington had lived in while commanding the American Revolutionary War troops.
Along with a handful of other men, most of whom he knew, he sought to create an American poetry in the first half of the 19 th century when the American experiment was still new. He was a civic poet, a poet’s role that no longer exists in white America. The American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow went from being the stuffy square’s square, the kind of writer that Modernists didn’t want to be, to a forgotten man, the writer that no one remembers even to reject.
So, do you know today’s poem from the above title, or from the name of the longer work from which it’s excerpted, “The Building of the Ship?” It’s highly unlikely that you would. At one time, as many knew and read his poems as Edgar Guest’s, and he was a much better versifier.
#Longfellow sail forth series
The author of today’s poem in our Independence Day series was more well-known than Ginsberg in his day, and he was as far from being an outsider as any American poet could be. Claude McKay led an outsiders’ life, Allen Ginsberg became a near celebrity bohemian whose outsider status changed over his life.
0 kommentar(er)
