A Psalm Of Life

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1838

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Death Before Death

In the second stanza, when the young man acknowledges, to himself as much as to the reader, that “[d]ust thou art, to dust returnest” (Line 7), he establishes the reality of mortality that no brave words, no courageous dreaming, no soaring spirit can avoid.

Death cannot be overcome or tricked. The poem, however, argues that in accepting death as a reality and an inevitability there is the threat of surrendering life itself to that considerable gravitational pull. To live like that is not to live at all. This concerns the young man, himself among them as he argues his case to the psalmist, those who, challenged by the unavoidable sorrows and trials of life, decide to abandon living itself. They render ironic the heroic will to engage every moment, to dare to make life worth being lived. Longfellow’s is no chirpy optimism. At the time of the poem’s drafting, he was himself 31 years old and working through the tragedy of losing both his child and his wife. At that threshold age, a midlife crisis moment, Longfellow uses the young man in the poem to dismiss surrender as contemptible, really the easy way out. There is no doubt in the young man’s perception that life is anything but easy. It is a battle, fierce and broad. Without the willingness to accept death as a reality and still engage every moment, to rise to the challenge of living, is to accept a condition of the un-dead, a zombie-like presence the young poet sees all around him.

Those conditioned by the Judeo-Christian ethos anticipate the afterlife, too content to live each day as specters, their heartbeat at once strange and ironic, its cadence marking a slow march to the grave. That un-life, those un-dead, are the young poet’s thematic concern, those who are alive physically but dead spiritually. Life, he reminds himself as much as the reader, is at best a “bivouac” (Line 18), that is a temporary encampment, for all its drama, for all its busy-ness, all too brief. Make the most of it, or else live with eyes downcast, feet shuffling, back hunched, more dead than alive.

The Courage to Live

“A Psalm of Life” is more than feel-good inspiration. The poem is designed to trigger action. The reader, startled by the clarion richness of the poem’s exhortation, resolves now to do, to act. Reading is not enough, feeling good is not enough, resolutions are not enough. Put down the poem, the young man says in all but words, and go do something defiantly purposeful and heroically executed. At the thematic center of Longfellow’s poem is his conception of the courage that living requires. It is all too easy to avoid the challenge of the present. The young man is quite clear that stepping away from the present to anticipate some happy future or to cling sourly to some traumatic past are gestures of moral cowardice. Resist giving into daydreams about possible futures, no matter how coaxing and “pleasant” (Line 21), wasting in some fantasy world the moments of life that are steadily, unstoppably dwindling. Resist idling in regrets and grudges, he says. “Let the dead Past bury its dead” (Line 22), an ironic echo of Christ’s words to his disciples in the Gospel of Luke.

Whereas Christ charges his disciples to forgo concerns of the world to focus on the ministry of salvation and the promise of redemption after death, here the young man uses the same phrasing to challenge the reader to let go of the past to focus on the promise of the moment. That, the young man admits, takes courage. “Act,” he demands, “act in the living Present” (Line 23), the word capitalized to emphasize his conviction that the moment alone provides each person the opportunity to display dedication and commitment. “Be up and doing” (Line 33), he says as he closes the poem. Given that life is a tense and difficult battle, heroes are defined by that courage to act, to engage the realities of the struggle and to assert a singular will to make a difference, to leave some imprint, to make a difference, a heroic act that the young man compares to leaving footprints along the beach to help guide and direct the shipwrecked who stagger along the beach close to despair, metaphorically those too impressed by heartache, too burdened by despair, too ready to abandon the will to act.

Hope, Despite Everything

The poem offers the gift of hope, but not the kind of hope offered by religions, that is the hope in salvation and the consolation of redemption. That the poem tenders a general sense of hopefulness and optimism without resorting to God is perhaps why the poem has found a niche among the best loved poems of the American people. This might also be why it is held in such suspicion by academics, who see such soaring affirmation as suspect, a dangerous illusion that panders to a gullible audience crushed by circumstances they cannot control, much less improve. Academics view this audience as all too eager for feel-good cliches that in the end affirm nothing real and offer no real remedy for lives of quiet desperation and commonplace sacrifice that ultimately end in the unheroic and decidedly pedestrian ordinariness of death. The poem, this argument goes, tries too hard to inspire, its didacticism too obvious, the eagerness of the thematic argument indicating the desperation of the central figure of the young man, rallying his own flagging spirits like a well-intentioned, if desperate football coach at halftime all too able to read the scoreboard and the lopsided defeat the team is facing.

To dismiss Longfellow’s gift of hope as somehow trite, greeting-card pablum, however, is to miss the poem’s larger thematic argument. It is about hope, certainly, but a kind of existential hope, a hope despite, hope despite eyes wide open and the heart fractured. The young poet is not simply affirming that life needs to be lived. That is the sugary stuff of Hallmark cards. Rather he is asserting, not affirming; hope is a goal, not a gift, earned not given. The time to start, the young man argues as much to himself as to the psalmist and the reader, is now. Unlike greeting card verses that touch the reader only briefly, Longfellow’s philosophical meditation on what life throws at individuals, the strife inevitable in living, intends to motivate genuine action, because in genuine action is the only viable alternative to living like “dumb, driven cattle” (Line 19), lives of dark and stifling surrender. Aspire, he counsels, and let the energy of that aspiration be the manifestation of authentic and pragmatic hope.