advice and refuses to heed the sailor, despite the
fact that just from the way the wind blows the
smoke from his pipe, he ought to see that a storm
is brewing. Here is the moment of the lesson. The
captain’s pride, manifest in his refusal to con-
sider the sailor’s advice, not the storm itself, is
the cause of the catastrophe. The captain is set
on braving the storm, asserting his power above
nature’s. Even when the storm is howling, in the
eighth stanza, he is unwilling to recognize his
error. Along with the greatcoat he gives to his
daughter, he boasts of his ability to outlast what-
ever storm may blow. The implication is clear:
that the captain’s flaw, his proud overconfi-
dence, is more significant than his strength, the
seacraft of which he boasts. His failing, because
of pride, to respect good advice and to regard
sound judgment thus compels him to that spar-
tan exercise of character inherent in bearing up
when there is, in fact, no other choice. The hope-
less situation is not, initially, the storm but his
own intransigence.
The scene of confrontation between the cap-
tain and the crewman gives way in the sixth
stanza to frozen portraiture again. Longfellow
elicits a picture of a turbulent seascape in the
sixth and seventh stanzas, of howling wind, beat-
ing snow, and seething waves. In the eighth,
what Justus takes as the captain’s heroism is
presented. In the face of the storm, he calls his
daughter to him and offers her solace with
words, telling her not to tremble and assuring
her of his prowess. In the ninth stanza, he wraps
her in his greatcoat and ties her to the ship’s mast
in the hope that, despite the calamity, he may
effect her survival. In the tenth stanza, the focus
of the narrative fully shifts from the captain to
his daughter, and from the strains of heroism
that characterize the captain’s sacrifice for his
daughter to the strains of pathos that surround
her. Her pathetic laments of the tenth, eleventh,
and twelfth stanzas go unanswered by her father.
He is shown dead, garishly frozen, at the end of
the twelfth and in the thirteenth stanza.
The first instance of prayer as a part of the
ballad occurs now in the fourteenth stanza.
Lashed to the ship’s mast and alive in the storm
after her father and the crew are dead, the cap-
tain’s daughter prays to the Christian savior that
he might save her. His power, according to the
Gospels, was so great that he was able to calm the
storm-tossed Sea of Galilee. The daughter’s
prayer increases the quality of pathos represented
in the ballad through her presence because of the
utter hopelessness of her situation. The impo-
tence of her prayer indicates the degree to which
she is bereft. In the midst of that hopelessness,
Longfellow, despite the formality and artifice of
the ballad meter he is using to tell the story,
keeps his narrative entirely true to a naturalistic
vision of experience. Nothing supernatural hap-
pens. Despite the invocation of the Gospel
story of Christ’s stilling the water of Galilee, to
which the maiden refers in her prayer, there
is no miraculous intervention. Instead, Longfel-
low goes forward headlong with his account of the
wreck, beginning the fifteenth stanza with ‘‘And,’’
indicating the propulsive inevitability of the storm
and its consequences. Implicitly, this ‘‘and’’ is
actually a ‘‘but.’’ Despite the legend of the miracle,
thereisnoanswerforthegirl’sprayer.Thereality
seems to contradict faith. Christ does not inter-
vene, and the storm force is the agency, in this case
the divinity, that guides the ship not toward a safe
haven but toward the rocky reef of Norman’s
Woe. Longfellow’s description of the wreck, the
smashing of the storm-driven ship against the
rocks, is the climax of the ballad. He moves the
reader from pathos to horror. The horror is,
moreover, at this point of the narrative, entirely
the result of the violent forces of nature. Long-
fellow describes the destruction of the ship by
comparing the rocks as the ship smashes against
them to the horns of a bull as it is goring, and he
ascribes an attitude of cruelty to the rocks. The
waves that are pummeling the vessel, in turn, are
characterized as roaring with laughter as they
pound the ship. Their laughter suggests the supe-
rior power of coldly vanquishing natural forces
over the captain’s misplaced self-confidence.
With the fury calmed, in the morning, in the
twentieth stanza, a fisherman on the beach sees
the work of the storm in the wreckage. Then the
focus of the ballad shifts again, away from the
storm and away from the fisherman on the shore
to what the fisherman sees. The focus is not the
ship but the girl, tied to the mast and floating on
the sea, her hair like seaweed bobbling in the
water. There is no Ovidian metamorphosis; the
girl is not transformed into something else, as so
many human creatures are transformed into
plants, animals, or minerals in Ovid’sMetamor-
phoses. Rather, Longfellow’s account of the fish-
erman’s last sighting of her, in which her hair is
seen as seaweed, asserts through its image the
commonality of human beings with nature and,
hence, the vulnerability of humans. The girl hasThe Wreck of the Hesperus