not been transformed into living vegetation by
any divine force. She is simply, irrevocably dead.
With this vulnerability in mind, Longfellow
ends the ballad with a prayer of his own, given
not by any of the characters in the ballad but by
himself as narrator. He begs Christ to spare ‘‘us’’
from such a death. ‘‘Us’’ may refer to the poet
himself, using a polite plural, or it may be an
actual plural meant to include the reader and,
thus, all humanity. In either case, a problem is
that the poet seems to have shown the inefficacy
of appeals to Christ at the heart of the storm.
Either the narrator’s invocation of Christ, in the
aftermath of Christ’s nonintervention when the
girl prayed, is a terrible, nearly blasphemous
irony or there is some other meaning buried
within it, something implied but not directly—
something that can perhaps best be represented
by the popular assertion that God helps those
who help themselves. What is Christ, after all,
beside a divinity if nottheemblem of humility?
And it is precisely the captain’s lack of humility,
his smug and careless pride, that is the actual
cause of the shipwreck. The storm is only the
agency of the tragedy.
What, then, is the poet praying for when he
prays for our safety? What is the danger he has in
mind? What the girl wants in praying is clear: she
wants Christ to intervene and stop the storm.
But Longfellow is not echoing her prayer in his.
He is not praying for miraculous deliverance at
the heart of a shipwreck, nor for the end of
tempests, nor even that we have the luck never
to meet such a tempest on a sea voyage. Such a
prayer, the ballad shows, is useless. Addition-
ally, it lacks the universality that can give a
prayer gravity and cause it to resonate with the
majority. Such a prayer as the doomed daughter
offers is not a prayer about people in general. It
is not a prayer in which submission is professed
but one that begs Christ to perform a miracle,
the suspension of nature’s operations in her
interest. What the poet utters when he asks
Christ to protect us from such a death is a prayer
for the kind of humility that permits good judg-
ment.The Wreck of the Hesperusis not about
bearing up but about submitting, realizing our
weaknesses and, consequently, acting prudently.
The proud but false assertion of mastery unin-
formed by the principle of meekness embodied in
Christ must lead to disaster.
Source:Neil Heims, Critical Essay on ‘‘The Wreck of the
Hesperus,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learn-
ing, 2010.
Agnieszka Salska
In the following excerpt, Salska discusses Long-
fellow’s status as both a nationalist poet, a repu-
tation established through such poems as ‘‘The
Wreck of the Hesperus,’’ and a cosmopolitan,
international poet.... The career of Henry Wadsworth Long-
fellow, certainly the most visible American
author of the nineteenth century and still the
most popular American poet ever, provides an
illustrative, though infrequently discussed exam-
ple of the ebbing energy of the nationalist
impulse accompanied by a growing tendency to
literary cosmopolitism. Throughout the second
half of the nineteenth century and well into the
twentieth, Longfellow remained a symbolic cul-
tural presence, a popular embodiment of Amer-
ican literary achievement, cultural openness, and
civilized sophistication. It was in him rather than
in Walt Whitman that the public saw the long
awaited incarnation of the native bard who at last
gave America the sense and measure of her liter-
ary potential and glory. Moreover, the incredible
sales figures for most of his volumes following
Voices of the Nightand the fact that by 1854 he
felt financially secure enough to resign his profes-
sorship at Harvard make Longfellow the first
American writer to demonstrate that a poetic
career in America could be materially rewarding.
Also today, the inevitable revaluation of his work
notwithstanding, critics continue to recognize the
centrality of Longfellow’s contribution to the
birth of American cultural self-sufficiency. For
example, introducing a selection of Longfellow’s
poems in theAtlantic Monthlyof 14 October
2000, David Barber writes:
If Walt Whitman, his younger contemporary
by a dozen years, is enshrined as the founding
father of modern American poetry, Longfellow
deserves no less than to be remembered as
the native bard who gave mythic dimension to
the country’s historical imagination, a national
poet of epic sweep and solemn feeling who
came along right at the moment when the
emerging nation had the most need for one.
The forest primeval, the village smithy under
the spreading chestnut tree, the midnight ride
of Paul Revere, the Indian princeling Hiawatha
in his birch canoe—such were the iconic images
Longfellow forged out of the American collec-
tive consciousness in volume after lionized
volume.
In January 1840, having completed ‘‘The
Wreck of the Hesperus,’’ Longfellow revealed
TheWreckoftheHesperus