Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82) was one of five American writers known alternately as the Fireside Poets or the Schoolroom Poets, because his verses were a favorite pastime for families who read together by the hearth while also the matter for memorization among young scholars up through the 20th century.
Longfellow’s best short poems make fitting recital for the fireside, especially because they often take for subject the value and consolation of domestic life. “The Children’s Hour,” for instance, recalls the arrival of small children at the armchair of their father, a description that gives to us a verse now so familiar it has become a cliché: “The patter of little feet.” In nearly all his poems, Longfellow’s language is plain, simple and memorable. His love of family life is beautifully, if often sentimentally, expressed.
A looming crisis
“The Fire of Drift-Wood” is an exception in that it is not sentimental but serious, even pained, in its study of a particular way in which evenings at home by the fireside can shape our lives. On a “damp and cold” night, two friends sit “within the farm-house old.” From the window, they look out on a seaside village with “lighthouse” and “dismantled fort, / The wooden houses, quaint and brown.”
Longfellow reminds us that we have a responsibility to the world, one which includes contemplating its sorrows.
The volume in which this poem first appeared was “The Seaside and the Fireside” (1849) and its title speaks of Longfellow’s greatest concerns. The poet worked and wrote for the abolitionist cause. He feared, as a poem from the volume notes, lest the “Ship of State” that was the Union should be ruined on the shoals of the cause of slavery. The sea, therefore, serves as a symbol of the great crises he and all Americans faced in the middle of the century and which culminated in the Civil War. The fireside, in contrast, is the place to which we return as a reprieve from such crises, sometimes to forget them — but sometimes to grasp their weight.
The refuge of the hearth
In this poem, the characters take a last, twilit look at the public turmoil of the day, before darkness falls, leaving only two things perceptible to the senses. Their “voices only broke the gloom,” but those voices tell of things now lost in the past, including “who was changed, and who was dead.” They rehearse the “secret pain” of friendships lost, even as words cannot express it properly. But then, their eyes are drawn “suddenly” to the fireplace, where the driftwood of wrecked ships burns as fuel.
The great misfortunes of the sea have entered into the refuge of the hearth. The evening visit has been transformed from a walk down memory lane to a somber memorial for the griefs of the world. The poem resolves into a “flame” of sorrow. The consolation it offers is not that we may simply forget our troubles but rather the discovery that our interior lives are fueled and formed by the events of history: We are part of the world, engaged in its actions, but also moved by its misfortunes. Longfellow reminds us that we have a responsibility to the world, one which includes contemplating its sorrows. With Christ he suggests, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Mt 5:4).
The Fire of Drift-wood
By Henry Wasworth Longfellow
DEVEREUX FARM, NEAR MARBLEHEAD.
We sat within the farm-house old,
Whose windows, looking o'er the bay,
Gave to the sea-breeze damp and cold,
An easy entrance, night and day.
Not far away we saw the port,
The strange, old-fashioned, silent town,
The lighthouse, the dismantled fort,
The wooden houses, quaint and brown.
We sat and talked until the night,
Descending, filled the little room;
Our faces faded from the sight,
Our voices only broke the gloom.
We spake of many a vanished scene,
Of what we once had thought and said,
Of what had been, and might have been,
And who was changed, and who was dead;
And all that fills the hearts of friends,
When first they feel, with secret pain,
Their lives thenceforth have separate ends,
And never can be one again;
The first slight swerving of the heart,
That words are powerless to express,
And leave it still unsaid in part,
Or say it in too great excess.
The very tones in which we spake
Had something strange, I could but mark;
The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.
Oft died the words upon our lips,
As suddenly, from out the fire
Built of the wreck of stranded ships,
The flames would leap and then expire.
And, as their splendor flashed and failed,
We thought of wrecks upon the main,
Of ships dismasted, that were hailed
And sent no answer back again.
The windows, rattling in their frames,
The ocean, roaring up the beach,
The gusty blast, the bickering flames,
All mingled vaguely in our speech;
Until they made themselves a part
Of fancies floating through the brain,
The long-lost ventures of the heart,
That send no answers back again.
O flames that glowed! O hearts that yearned!
They were indeed too much akin,
The drift-wood fire without that burned,
The thoughts that burned and glowed within.
