28 pages • 56 minutes read
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowEvangeline: A Tale of Acadie
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1847A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Ideal Womanhood: Love, Patience, Devotion, and Faith
At the beginning of the poem, Evangeline is just 17 years old and has every advantage in life. Her father is the wealthiest farmer in the village, while she herself is gentle, beautiful, and much admired by everyone. She is about to be married to her childhood sweetheart. During the deportation, however, her whole world falls apart. Her father dies on the beach, and her husband of just five days is bundled off onto a ship while she remains at the shore. A life of endless trials and sorrow ensues as she seeks to be reunited with her husband after such a cruel reversal of fortune.
Evangeline’s situation is both tragic and desperate: How is she going to survive? She finds the solution in her Christian faith, in which she has been well schooled. “Charity, meekness, love, and hope, and forgiveness, and patience!” (Part 1, Canto IV, Line 120) are her watchwords from the beginning. The words of the notary, René Leblanc, who believes that divine justice will prevail, gives her inspiration. She is also under the tutelage of Father Felician, who encourages her to develop the spiritual qualities that will allow her to triumph over all adversity, as when he tells her:
Patience; accomplish thy labour; accomplish thy work of affection!
Sorrow and silence are strong, and patient endurance is godlike.
Therefore accomplish thy labor of love, till the heart is made godlike,
Purified, strengthened, perfected, and rendered more worthy of heaven! (Part 2, Canto I, Lines 59-62).
Later, the priest at the Jesuit Mission also gives Evangeline sound Christian counsel.
Many years go by as Evangeline searches far and wide for Gabriel, and she is alternately buoyed by hope and crushed by disappointment. Throughout these trials, she reveals the strength of her character. Naturally enough, she has her periods of sorrow and distress, and sometimes she weeps, but she remains strongly grounded in her religious faith, and she holds her absent husband in her heart during all the long years of their separation. She shows courage, endurance, and resilience. She also finds fulfillment in a life of service. By the time she returns to Philadelphia nearly 40 years after the departure from Acadia, she has grown in spiritual stature. As a Sister of Mercy she no longer needs male spiritual advisors to strengthen her faith. She knows very well how she must live. Her only wish, now that she no longer has any hope of being reunited with Gabriel, is “[p]atience and abnegation of self, and devotion to others” (Part 2, Canto V, Line 31). Her only desire is to follow “[m]eekly, with reverent steps, the sacred feet of her Saviour” (Line 36). She has found her path, and the God of her devotion grants her a final, bittersweet reward.
The Beauty of Nature and its Divine Source
Lying behind the human drama that the poem presents is the constant beauty of the natural world in all its varied and changing forms. This is apparent from the beginning, with the descriptions of Grand-Pré and Benedict’s farm, but it reaches fuller expression as the band of exiles, including Evangeline, travel south and reach an area that is entirely new to them. Louisiana is the region of “perpetual summer” (Part 2, Canto II, Line 23), and the narrator is eager to describe its many natural delights. As the travelers make their way down the Mississippi,
Cotton-trees nodded their shadowy crests, they swept with the current,
Then emerged into broad lagoons, where silvery sand-bars
Lay in the stream, and along the wimpling waves of their margin,
Shining with snow-white plumes, large flocks of pelicans waded (Part 2, Canto II, Lines 16-19).
One morning, the same travelers observe a glorious scene as the sun shines on the lakes in the area of the Atchafalaya river:
Water-lilies in myriads rocked on the slight undulations
Made by the passing oars, and, resplendent in beauty, the lotus
Lifted her golden crown above the heads of the boatmen.
Faint was the air with the odorous breath of magnolia blossoms,
And with the heat of noon; and numberless sylvan islands,
Fragrant and thickly embowered with blossoming hedges of roses,
Near to whose shores they glided along, invited to slumber (Part 2, Canto II, Lines 68-74).
Later, when Evangeline is staying at Basil’s house, she walks outside at night to the edge of the prairie, and a fine sight greets her: “Silent it lay, with a silvery haze upon it, and fire-flies / Gleaming and floating away in mingled and infinite numbers” (Part 2, Canto II, Lines 152-53).
Similarly, the beginning of Canto IV evokes the rivers that flow in their winding course across the continent, east, west, and south; in the south, “numberless torrents” (Part 2, Canto IV, Line 10) make their way to the ocean, sounding “like the great chords of a harp” (Line 11). Between all those waters are “the wondrous, beautiful prairies; / Billowy bays of grass ever rolling in shadow and sunshine, / Bright with luxuriant clusters of roses and purple amorphas” (Lines 12-14).
Notably, the narrator often adds a spiritual dimension to natural scenes to convey the notion that all of nature (as well as human life) is under the care of God. For example, the above description of rivers and prairies, as well as the animals and people that live there, concludes, “[a]nd over all is the sky, the clear and crystalline heaven, / Like the protecting hand of God inverted above them” (Part 2, Canto IV, Lines 27-28). Another example, which became famous in Longfellow’s day, comes earlier, in a description of a moonlit night in Grande-Pré. Over the sea and the meadows, “[s]ilently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, / Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels” (Part I, Canto III, Lines 84-85).
Thus, the descriptions of nature often point to the benevolence and watchfulness of God over all things; they show the divine origin of all life and the sustenance it provides. The guiding hand of God, although not always seen by suffering humans, is never absent.
Cruelty, Misfortune, and Divine Mercy
An almost unimaginable cruelty suddenly erupts and destroys the peaceful life that the villagers enjoyed in Grand-Pré. They have the misfortune to get caught in the middle of a long-running rivalry between two European colonizing nations, and they pay a high price for it. The British authorities show them no compassion; families are separated and the village is burned down. “Man is unjust” (Part 1, Canto III, Line 34), rightly says René Leblanc, the notary, but his fervent belief that the injustice of men is balanced out by the justice of God seems never to be vindicated, since the British oppressors pay no price at all in the poem for their acts of cruelty and inhumanity. (The notion of divine justice comforts Evangeline for a short while but after that it is never mentioned again.)
While the British get away with it, the Acadians are forced to wander for many years in a strange land; theirs is an “exile without an end” (Part 2, Canto I, Line 4); scattered like “flakes of snow” (Line 6) when the wind blows, they are doomed to wander “Friendless, homeless, hopeless . . . from city to city” (Line 8). For poor Evangeline, the initial catastrophe is compounded by many years of sheer bad luck, when it almost seems as if life is playing a cruel joke on her: Several times she almost comes upon Gabriel but is just too late. This happens when she is reunited with Gabriel’s father Basil, who tells her that Gabriel departed earlier that very day. It happens again when Evangeline reaches the town of Adayes, where Gabriel had been heading, and finds out that he left Adayes the previous day. At the mission in the Ozarks, Evangeline misses Gabriel by one week. And so it goes on. Evangeline seems to be a living example of a woman of perpetual misfortune.
As a counterpoint to this tale of woe, however, is the strong suggestion of the operation of divine mercy, not only in the life of Evangeline but others too, such as Basil. Basil may have been exiled from one paradise, but he finds another in Louisiana, and many of his fellow exiles are able to join him. From catastrophe, something good emerges, although Basil does not appear to be a particularly religious man and does not make a show of thanking God. With Evangeline, however, it is different. Despite the constant difficulties and disappointments that take place on the surface of her life, deep within she is developing a strength and a faith in God that will accompany her all her life. She certainly has good fortune in her choice of spiritual advisers, such as Father Felician and the priest at the Jesuit Mission. These men fortify her belief in the existence of a merciful God who guides the traveler’s journey and will answer prayers. Longfellow no doubt intended the reader to understand that it was God who after many years guided Evangeline back to Philadelphia, where at the last she is reunited with Gabriel, even if only for a moment. After Gabriel’s death, Evangeline bows her head and says, “Father, I thank thee!” (Part 2, Canto V, Line 129), which shows her recognition that all things come from God and that his mercy did not desert her, despite all her trials.
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By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
