Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” is one of the most beloved and most often anthologized poems in the American literary canon. With its inspirational message of encouragement despite life’s considerable vicissitudes and its affirmation of the endurance of the soul despite the difficult reality of death, the poem remains a staple in literature classes more than 150 years after its publication. Its stirring lines, memorized by generations of schoolchildren, have been generously quoted at funerals, graduations, and weddings. Published anonymously in one of New York City’s most prestigious magazines, Knickerbocker, in the fall of 1838 (Longfellow, then a struggling poet in his early 30s, reportedly was promised $5.00 for the poem, money he famously never received), the poem is ostensibly an interior monologue, a celebration of the joys and sorrows of living directed against a lector in church who sings or reads Christian psalms that demand life be endured as a grim and thankfully brief pilgrimage to the rewards and consolations of the afterlife. Now recognized as one of the grandest works of the Fireside Poets, the first generation of poets and essayists centered largely around Boston, born not British subjects but rather American citizens who sought in their work to mentor and inspire their new nation, “A Psalm of Life” counsels commitment to moral integrity and to life’s duties as a way to make purposeful the brief span that is the measure of any lifetime.

Poet Biography

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in 1807 in Portland, Maine (then western Massachusetts). Born into privilege (his father was a prominent lawyer and later a member of Congress), Longfellow, a precocious student and voracious reader, early on was fascinated by the power of language (he studied languages at Maine’s Bowdoin College). He was enthralled by the sheer aural delight in the sonic play of words. Indeed, he was musically trained, adept at both flute and piano. He traveled widely in Europe delighting in learning to communicate in multiple languages. After a tragically brief marriage (his wife died in childbirth), Longfellow, grief-stricken, returned to New England and, in 1836, accepted a teaching post at Harvard. He would remarry and joyfully parent six children.

Longfellow, at the time known more for his travel essays, published his first volume of poetry, which included “A Psalm of Life,” in 1839. The book found an immediate audience, as did Longfellow’s follow-up volume, published just two years later. Over the next 10 years, Longfellow emerged as one of the most widely recognized and successful figures in American writing. Largely on the strength of Evangeline (1847), an epic poem, and best seller, about tragic love set against the brutal British displacement of French settlers from Nova Scotia during the French-Indian War, Longfellow retired from teaching in 1854 to commit himself entirely to his poetry. In the years leading up the Civil War, Longfellow was remarkably prolific. He became the preeminent voice of the new nation even as that nation was splitting apart. His works, most notably “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “The Song of Hiawatha,” “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” and “The Village Blacksmith,” upcycled inherited British poetic forms by treating American subjects, the new nation’s limitless natural beauty, its heroic colonial history, and its stately native cultures. His poems quickly became fixtures in American classrooms, generations of schoolkids recited and even memorized his lines. The poems, with their carefully measured rhythms and stately rhymes, lent themselves to public recitation and were frequently quoted in church socials, community picnics, and gatherings to celebrate national holidays.

Shortly after the nation Longfellow so loved came apart, his wife died in a bizarre and entirely avoidable housefire. Longfellow himself was scarred and grew out his signature beard. For more than two years, the combination of his profound grief over the senseless accident and the relentlessly grim news of the blood-cost of the war, Longfellow wrote nothing. Then in his 60s, Longfellow moved to London, where over the next 20 years he gradually returned to poetry, publishing seven volumes of verse—often extended meditations on the dynamic of time, mortality, and love. He was internationally the most recognized figure in American letters. His stature as America’s unofficial National Bard was confirmed when by an act of Congress his 75th birthday was declared a national holiday. He died the following spring, March, 1882.

Poem Text

What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,   

   Life is but an empty dream!       

For the soul is dead that slumbers,    

   And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!    

   And the grave is not its goal;   

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,   

   Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, 

   Is our destined end or way; 

But to act, that each to-morrow  

   Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,  

   And our hearts, though stout and brave, 

Still, like muffled drums, are beating 

   Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle, 

   In the bivouac of Life,  

Be not like dumb, driven cattle! 

   Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant! 

   Let the dead Past bury its dead!  

Act,— act in the living Present!  

   Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us  

   We can make our lives sublime, 

And, departing, leave behind us 

   Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,  

   Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,  

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,  

   Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,  

   With a heart for any fate;  

Still achieving, still pursuing,  

   Learn to labor and to wait.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. “A Psalm of Life.” 1938. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The poem’s subtitle suggests the poem itself is a heated response of a young man who passionately objects to the staid advice of Christian psalms that suggest life is to be quietly endured until the rich reward of the afterlife.

Presumably, the young man has heard a psalmist declaim during a church service a selection or two from the wisdom verses of the Old Testament Book of Psalms, songs intended to give heart to those who struggle through life by reminding them to trust in God and the promise of salvation. The psalmist never actually speaks in the poem, nor is the psalmist given a chance to rebut the young man’s argument. Indeed, as the subtitle suggests, the young man never actually says any of his argument aloud. He has been so agitated by what he has heard, his heart is a maelstrom of churned emotion. It is easy to imagine the young man squirming uncomfortably in a pew, fidgeting, his face an angry crimson. He cannot not outline in his heart his rejection of the Christian wisdom, and his faith in the rewards of living fully in the world and finding the way to make life here and now meaningful, directed, and fulfilling.

The perception offered in the Christian psalms, that life is a tedium, the poem suggests, renders the vibrant and animated soul a dead and useless thing and deceives the perceptive heart into dismissing as chimera the joys (and sorrows) of life and indeed life itself as meaningless. In Stanza 2, the young man insists that life is no chimera and that death cannot be its goal. Certainly, everything must die, everything must return to dust, he readily acknowledges, but death is not to be hungered after.

In Stanza 3, the poet, building his case carefully, seeing the risks of misinterpreting his idea of embracing life, indicts both hedonistic atheists and joyless drones. To those who see life as a frivolous game to be enjoyed like play or to those who regard life as an unending drudgery, a grim routine of sorrows and tribulation, the brutal interplay of anticipation and disappointment, the young man argues rather that each day is a gift and that each day offers new opportunities for the willing, the inspired, to act, to move forward, sustained by ambitions and compelled by goals.

In Stanza 4, the young man regrets that despite such evident truth, too many people, their spirits broken, drag themselves through life, their hearts “beating / Funeral marches to the grave” (Lines 15-16). The young man decries such a limited life, comparing such dull-eyed people to cattle. Life is a battle, certainly, but be a hero, he demands, rise up against and amid the inevitable conflicts and unexpected agonies of life. In Stanza 6, the young man rejects dwelling in the past, unable or unwilling to let go of grudges or regrets or lost opportunities, and he dismisses wasting life anticipating some joyful afterlife. Act in the now, he challenges, act in the “living present” (Line 23).

In the next stanza, the young man uses the example of the lives of great people from history to illustrate his argument. They left behind their achievements for generations to come, like footprints left in wet sand, achievements that can in turn inspire those who come later to maintain positive focus and never let life’s vicissitudes destroy that urgent sense of purposeful direction.

In the closing stanza, the young man concludes his passionate argument by rallying the faint hearted and the soul-dead to live, to be “up and doing” (Line 33). No one can anticipate life’s turns, sorrows are inevitable, disappointments a certainty, despair a constant hobgoblin. Pessimism, however, cannot be the final word; life, in the end, will reward diligence, hard work, and patience. The poem thus becomes the young man’s own psalm, a secular rather than sacred song. This psalm does not celebrate, like Old Testament psalms, sacrificing the art and act of living, passing through life, eyes down, heart stoppered, anticipating some grand something in some vague afterlife. Rise to the challenge of living, the young man argues, and let every moment be its own reward.