Newton Arvin, inLongfellow: His Life and Work,
concedes the poem’s charm while denigrating its
quality. He remarks, ‘‘Hackneyed as it is, ‘The
Wreck of the Hesperus’ could hardly be sur-
passed as a literary imitation of the border
ballad—for if the subject is native, the style is a
perfect pastiche of the English or Scottish popu-
lar ballad, of ‘Sir Patrick Spens.’’’ Arvin con-
cludes,‘‘Itisapoemfortheyoung...without
any more under-feeling than the subject itself
carries with it, but on its youthful level, it has in
it the authentic terror of the sea.’’ Cecil B. Wil-
liams, inHenry Wadsworth Longfellow(1964),
calls ‘‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’’ ‘‘prolix, senti-
mental, unconvincing.’’
This kind of ambivalence has defined
responses to Longfellow’s verse from the start
of his career. Upon Longfellow’s death in 1882,
the great American poet Walt Whitman, in so
many ways unlike Longfellow, offered an
appraisal in theCritic:
Longfellow in his voluminous works seems to
me not only to be eminent in the style and
forms of poetical expression that mark the
present age (an idiocrasy, almost a sickness,
of verbal melody), but to bring what is
always dearest as poetry to the general human
heart and taste.... He is certainly the sort of
bard and counteractant most needed for our
materialistic, self-assertive, money-worship-
ping, Anglo-Saxon races, and especially for
the present age in America—an age tyranni-
cally regulated with reference to the manufac-
turer, the merchant, the financier, the politician
and the day workman—for whom and among
whom he comes as the poet of melody, cour-
tesy, deference—poet of the mellow twilight of
the past in Italy, Germany, Spain, and in
Northern Europe—poet of all sympathetic
gentleness—and universal poet of women and
young people. I should have to think long if I
were asked to name the man who has done
more, and in more valuable directions, for
America.Nearly a hundred years later, Virginia Jackson
paid a similar tribute to Longfellow inModern
Language Quarterly:
He did write the nineteenth century’s best-sell-
ing poems, made to be read as if they were
pictures, as if reading were self-evident, as
if their elaborate classical meters were really
a transparent language. What Longfellow
imprinted was perhaps not a national literary
tradition but the much more historically persis-
tent fantasy that a nation might become a
literature.CRITICISMNeil Heims
Heims is a freelance writer and the author or
editor of over two dozen books on literary subjects.
In this essay, he argues that the underlying catas-
trophe in ‘‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’’ is not the
storm but the captain’s stubborn pride.
James H. Justus, writing in Nineteenth-
Century American Poetryin 1985, characterizes
‘‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’’ and another
Longfellow ballad as ‘‘tales of death with
lessons on the necessity of bearing up.’’ But
if there is a lesson to ‘‘The Wreck of the
Hesperus’’ (and for most readers the reward
the poem offers is not a lesson but the kinetic
thrill of horror at Longfellow’s knack for ren-
dering verbal pictures of raging nature), it
seems much more clearly to be this: pay atten-
tion to what actually is and do not be guided
by pride or some unreasonable idea of your
own powers. ‘‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’’ is
a kind of sermon, and like a sermon, first it
secures the attention of its auditors or readers
with its compelling narrative drive, and then it
suggests a wrong and a right way of behaving.
It ends with a prayer, which appears in the
final lines of its last stanza—the poet’s prayer
that we all may be spared a disaster like the
one he has just recounted. What that disaster is
seems apparent: the kind of end the schooner
and its crew met. But the poem is a reflection
upon a deeper, prior disaster. The consequences
of the tempest, the destruction of theHesperus,
and the death of its complement, follow from
the proud intractability of the captain. As is
implicit in Longfellow’s closing prayer, the
reader may detect a suggestion, gleaned from
the circumstances recounted in the ballad, that
the poet is referring to a catastrophe of char-
acter rather than of nature.
‘‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’’ begins as if it
were a fairy tale or a winter’s tale, a chilling
narrative enjoyed around a warm fire, an evoca-
tive account drawn from a dark memory of a
terrible event. Its first stanza commences with
words that have the formal introductory quality
of the phrase that spinners of tales have tradi-
tionally used to begin, ‘‘Once upon a time.’’ The
actual words, the pronoun ‘‘it’’ and the past tense
of the verbto be, ‘‘was,’’ echo and vary the first
words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s superna-
tural sermon of the sea concerning guilt and
redemption, ‘‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’’The Wreck of the Hesperus