(1798). (Coleridge keeps the verb in the present
tense because his story focuses on penitence
rather than on an irrevocable catastrophe.)
Longfellow’s opening stanza presents a concise
depiction of the situation the poem will address.
Longfellow begins his narrative with a keenness
of pictorial representation and a telltale dra-
matic tension that characterize his method
throughout ‘‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’’ and
give the poem its energy, pathos, and immedi-
acy. To begin, he uses what may be seen as a
cinematic long shot of the sailing ship upon the
ocean in winter. Quickly the imaginary camera
moves in, passing the captain and coming to rest
on his daughter. She is the subject of the second
stanza, which is devoted in its entirety to present-
ing a picture of her, through metaphor and sim-
ile, comparing her to several flowers and to the
bright morning, as a figure of the glory of spring-
time within the hibernal context of the poem.
Turning from one idealized portrait to
another, from the description of the daughter,
the poet moves in the third stanza to a picture of
her father. Longfellow limns him as a model of a
New England seaman, standing beside the ship’s
helm, smoking his pipe, watching the wind blow
away his puffs of smoke. The third and fourth
stanzas set this tableau vivant of lovely child and
steadfast father in motion with the introduction
of an old crew member. These stanzas offer the
crucial, dramatic encounter between the crew-
man and the captain, serving to define the cap-
tain for the reader and establishing the cause of
the wreck as a force ulterior to the storm. The old
mariner brings a sage warning of an approaching
hurricane. His advice is to return the ship to
port. The captain is more than steadfast, how-
ever; he is bullheaded. In his pride, he scorns theWHAT
DO I READ
NEXT? A Night to Remember(1955), by Walter
Lord, is a factual novelistic account of the
sinking of the ocean liner RMSTitanicin
1912 after hitting an iceberg.
‘‘The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens,’’ an anon-
ymous Scottish ballad dating from the Mid-
dle Ages (found in Francis James Child’s
English and Scottish Popular Ballads, first
published 1883–98), is of particular interest
to readers of ‘‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’’
because Longfellow used some of the same
language and language patterns in his poem
as appear in ‘‘Sir Patrick Spens.’’
The Caine Mutiny(1951), a Pulitzer Prize-
winning novel by Herman Wouk, traces the
career of a ship and its erratically author-
itarian captain.
‘‘Der Erlko ̈nig’’—in English, ‘‘The Erlking’’—
isaballadwrittenin1782byJohannWolf-
gang von Goethe about a father’s harrowing
journey through a death-haunted night with
his child. It was set several times to music,
most notably by Franz Schubert in 1815.
‘‘Master and Man’’ (1895), by Leo Tolstoy,
is a story of a wealthy man and his servant
and how their encounter with a blizzard
when traveling together affects their rela-
tionship and their sense of life’s meaning
and purpose.
‘‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’’ (1798),
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is a ballad con-
cerning the misadventures of a sailor and his
expiation of guilt.
‘‘To Build a Fire’’ (1908), a short story by
Jack London, tells of a man’s unsuccessful
fight with the forces of nature in the Yukon.
‘‘The Wreck of the Deutschland,’’ a thirty-
five stanza poem by Gerard Manley Hop-
kins, written in 1875 and 1876 and first pub-
lished in 1918, is a meditation on faith
generated by the 1875 shipwreck of the
Deutschland, a ship on which five Francis-
can nuns were among those who perished.
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 CHARACTER RATHER THAN OF
NATURE.’’TheWreckoftheHesperus