A Psalm Of Life

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1838

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

Given its intended audience, a mass-market readership of modestly-educated, upper middle-class readers coming to a monthly magazine as much for diversion and entertainment as for moral guidance and instruction, the poem uses one of poetry’s most familiar and least intimidating formal structures: the tightly rhymed quatrain. The poem repeats that structure without any variety, each of the nine quatrain-stanzas thus working to reenforce a sense of familiarity as the pattern repeats, a formal strategy that in turn creates a confidence in a reader, a sense of knowing exactly where the poem is going.

In addition, the poem follows a tight end-rhyme scheme, ABAB, that creates a musical feel to the poem, appropriate given that within the Judeo-Christian tradition of psalms the verses are often sung. Indeed, Longfellow’s poem has been transcribed into a variety of musical forms, including gospel, hymns, folk, and country. Given the poem’s careful sonic texture of assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds within the same line) as well as consonance and alliteration (the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line) that sense of music is enhanced. This formal strategy—invoking a rich range of feeling through sonic manipulations despite an overall repetitive structure—suggests the poem’s theme that life, despite its routine and its drudgery, is a stunning exultation that can engage and delight and inspire.

Ultimately, the form encourages recitation, often quite dramatic to match the poem’s wide emotional range as the poem draws on intense images of war and shipwrecks and extends compassionate sympathy to those who find life overwhelming and vexing.

Meter

At first read, Longfellow’s poem can seem so tightly metered that it can become singsong-y like some children’s nursery rhyme. The meter can threaten to distract from, even undercut the poem’s argument about enduring life’s challenges and finding a way to heroic courage. Despite the gravity of its argument and Longfellow’s own deep personal sorrows that generated the poem, that feeling of being too rhythmic, too metered, in the hands of careless recitation, can reduce the poem to a greeting card jauntiness.

Examining more closely the meter of the poem reveals how Longfellow himself militates against that singsong-y feel. Yes, the poem is made of nine tightly sculpted quatrains with end rhymes, a formal pattern followed without variation or deviation, appearing to invite sloppy recitation. The lines, however, are not repetitive. The first and third lines of each quatrain have eight syllable beats. The second and fourth lines, however, have only seven syllable beats. That leaves those lines with a dramatic pause, necessary to maintain the rhythm of the quatrain. That pause has to happen, the click and clatter of regular beats is held for a single count that creates a moment of reflection, a delay long enough to keep attention off the meter and on to the argument. That metrical device, the alteration of syllables within a quatrain, interdicts singsong-y delivery. Recitation is perforce slowed down, made more organic as vocal emphasis is displaced and reworked in each line, recreating the studied, august feel appropriate to public poetry treating Seriously Big Topics.

Voice

The subtitle describes the voice in the poem as a young man. The voice is defiant, upbeat (indicated by the plethora of exclamation points), optimistic, and urgent. The young man disdains wallowing in grief or surrendering to complacency, perhaps not Longfellow but rather who Longfellow wants to be. The verb the subtitle uses—said—seems ironically understated given the emotions of the lines, the challenge the young man throws down and the uncompromising way in which that challenge is delivered, dismissing those who resist his urgent message of purposeful action as cattle or slaves or the undead.

The dynamic of the poem, however, leaves unclear to whom the young man is talking or even whether the young man is talking to anyone. He is reacting to the psalmist in his church, a liturgical position like a choirmaster or a lector, in this case responsible for presenting, either in recitation or in song, psalms appropriate to the ongoing church service. Or perhaps the psalmist refers to the young man’s inner Christian, long fed on the supposed comforting words of the psalms only to find that now, within some unnamed tragedy or trial, the words ring hollow and insufficient. Is the young man arguing to a person who maintains a prominent position within a church that no longer appears to nurture the kind of soul the young man believes he possesses? That makes the voice defiant and heroic and, within polite society, a threat of anarchic spiritual independence. Or is the poem itself a testimony to the troubled young man struggling to recover from trauma, struggling to put a brave voice to the reality that religion cannot comfort him. The voice then is desperate, hanging exclamation points to create a convincing sense of bravado, a forced optimism, which accounts for the uncertainty with which he rallies his flagging spirit—after all “Act” is hardly a plan—hence the curious lack of specificity in his optimism.

In either case, the voice rejects more than it can affirm, tests more than it can confirm, and hopes more than it can reassure.