Given the biographical backstory that surrounds the drafting of the poem, it is tempting to define the poem from that narrow context. The young man in the poem determined to assert some purpose in a life that ends, always prematurely and always sorrowfully, by challenging the inherited wisdom of Christianity. This assertion can be read as a dialogue between Longfellow’s own two selves. Longfellow is grieving the death of his child and his young wife from the catastrophe of a miscarriage (the young man), unable to find comfort in the Christian religion of his upbringing (the psalmist).

Although the context of a personal tragedy gives the poem its emotional depth, that context cannot entirely account for the wide and immediate success the poem found in America. Inevitably the poem was taken as a clarion call to a young nation, still uncertain over its future, and still struggling, almost 50 years after winning independence, to emerge from the considerable shadow of England. The young man, then, becomes the voice of the new nation, defiant, hopeful, ambitious. The poem was embraced as a celebration of a new spirit of can-do, distinctly American optimism, the young man defying the glum psalmist and Christianity’s long tradition of passive endurance, as a joyful repudiation of the gloomy Puritan sense of determinism with its doleful gospel of life lived as patient endurance, a pessimism brought to the New World by those British ancestors.