Nature

“Nature” is the work of a poet in his maturity. Longfellow drafted what would become “Nature” when he was past 70 years old. Within his lifetime, Longfellow buried two wives; he watched most of his colleagues die; he suffered through a civil war that cost the country he loved close to a million dead, counted and uncounted. He escaped multiple brushes with death and, at the time of the poem’s composition, struggled with numerous debilitating circulatory conditions. However, none of that impacts the quiet and steady joy in the poem in which Longfellow offers hope: He states that after the day is done, we will settle down for a good night’s sleep and await a tomorrow we cannot begin to comprehend.

Longfellow, speaking from his earned reputation as his generation’s leading light, seeks to counsel readers how best to approach the inevitability of death. Longfellow was a lifelong Christian and believed in the afterlife. However, he could also not ignore the cultural press of the new sciences that, in measuring the hard data of the earth and the solar system, seemed to challenge the idea of an afterlife. Therefore, Longfellow offers as metaphor the perplexing state of contemporary Christians who, as they grow older, must face the reality of their mortality: a small child, bewildered, confused, tired, and, even as he trundles off to a grateful rest, sorting through the implications of the gentle promise that tomorrow will bring with it blessings and gifts the child cannot begin to understand.

The allegory of the child at bedtime gifts the poem with its optimism. Longfellow recasts Nature as a kind and loving mother who understands that a child whom she loves is tired after a long and happy day; he is ready for bed although not entirely ready to abandon play. The boy looks on his playthings “[h]alf willing, half reluctant” (Line 3) even as he takes his mother’s hand to head to bed. His toys suggest all those enticing and rewarding elements that create the life narratives of people: possessions, relationships, talents and interests, hopes and satisfactions, and so on.

Longfellow uses the mother and child allegory to acknowledge what Christians resist acknowledging because for steadfast Christians the insight edges toward atheism. Within Christian theology, a person should go willingly toward death. They are, after all, pilgrims, making their way through life with their eyes focused on the long-anticipated reward of the afterlife. The belief that one “should” go willingly germinates the anxieties that Longfellow seeks to assuage. The idea of the mother coaxing the child to embrace a much-needed good night’s sleep by promising that tomorrow will be even better is similar to the idea of inspiring people with visions of a peaceful afterlife to embrace the “long night’s sleep,” or death. Like a child clinging to old and broken toys without testing the promise of new and unbroken toys, a person panics with the approach of life’s endpoint, certain that these sad and broken toys are the best to hope for. Without diminishing or dismissing the wonder and appeal of “what we know” (Line 14), the poet offers the difficult optimism of a mother eager to shepherd a reluctant child to bed. To a culture rooted in the Christian dynamics of earth and heaven, yearning for the afterlife yet growing increasingly aware of science, Longfellow’s poem offers a compromise: Believe in something better, the mother counsels, because there is no reason not to.