Nature

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1878

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context

One of the most remarkable distinctions post-Revolution America offered the world was its sense of returning humanity to nature. For all the advances in its industrial economic base, Longfellow’s America was still an agrarian, rural culture, such as Europe had long ago domesticated. For Longfellow, the exploration of nature—detailing its majesty, recording its stunning sensual impact, embracing the wonder of undeveloped pristine wilderness—was essential to his poetry and to any poetry seeking to represent America. Nature was an intrinsic element of American identity.

Despite its title, “Nature” is not about America’s vast natural frontier. Nature is less the physical environment of the New World (the sonnet here offers no descriptions of the American outdoors and instead takes place inside a home at bedtime) and more the embodiment of its gentle and coaxing spirit. In this, Longfellow reflects his historic context. Even as the Fireside poets were articulating the future doctrine of transcendentalism that celebrated the accessibility of nature in America, Longfellow here holds conversation with Nature. He recognized the spiritual argument that recast nature itself into an energy of redemption first posited by fellow Fireside poet Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Literary Context

Longfellow was an American poet at a time when no one was sure what the term meant. The generation of Americans coming-of-age in the opening decades of the 19th century, their parents (and some of them) born British subjects, needed a distinctly American literature. By the time of the publication of “Nature,” Longfellow, born just 25 years after the Battle of Yorktown, had accomplished the two things he doubted could ever happen in his lifetime: An American made a living from writing, and an American writer would be celebrated in England.

Longfellow emerged as one of the boldest and most successful expressions of a confederacy of highly-educated poets and philosophers, gathered loosely around the Boston area, who became known collectively as the Fireside poets. This moniker reflected how their works were read in parlors by families who found the poetry both engaging and inspiring. These poets—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and William Cullen Bryant—were cultural celebrities. Schoolchildren recited their works; government decrees acknowledged their status; parks and streets were named in their honor; their homes became pilgrim-sites for admirers; statues of them were erected throughout New England; and their funerals were massively-conceived staged events.

By the mid-1820’s, there simply was no American poetry. The Fireside poets sought to define a national literature by applying models of British poetics, such as the discipline of tight meter and chiseled rhyme schemes, to American subjects written for American readers. The Fireside poets dismissed the idea of poetry venting the private agonies or joys of an introspective (that is, Romantic) poet-figure. Poetry had a public function, part of the national enterprise to drive forward a nation dismissed by most of the world as an aberration doomed to collapse of its own irony. Thus, the poetry endeavored to use the vehicle of easy-to-memorize rhythms and rhyme schemes to preach an accessible message of hope and to earn international respect. As the most prominent of the Fireside poets, Longfellow’s long publishing career earned him (and American culture) respect abroad, most notably in the reception his works enjoyed in England, evidenced by the bust of him placed in Westminster Abbey’s renowned Poets’ Corner with a plaque erected by the poet’s “English admirers.”