Nature

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1878

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

“Nature” is a Petrarchan sonnet. Named for Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), a Renaissance Italian poet whose body of verse perfected the form, the Petrarchan sonnet includes both a problem and a solution. Longfellow, a student of the literatures of Antiquity, understood the mechanics of this sonnet iteration and used the form throughout his career. The 14 lines, standard in a sonnet, are divided into two sections: the first eight lines (the octave) set the basic situation and raise a critical question which is then answered in the sonnet’s closing six lines (the sestet).

In Longfellow’s Petrarchan sonnet, the octave is posed as a challenge to the poet who understands the psychology of bedtime and sympathizes with the child and the mother who understands the situation in a broader context than the child. The octave reveals without judgment or scorn the dilemma of the child. In the octave, the poet presents a compelling case that hinges on the word “broken”—that is, what the child cannot see or will not see: the things he knows are worn out, broken, all but useless. It is time for newer, grander playthings. The octave then both sets up the dilemma, gently and lovingly, and then foreshadows the resolution, generous and hopeful.

The sestet responds to the challenge of the octave by dropping the metaphor and introducing its own key: the gentle mother represents Nature; the child represents individuals who do not see the possibility of a context grander than the finite world; and the promise of new toys represents the transcendent realities that are perhaps awaiting. In the sestet, the poet elevates the argument by introducing the word “transcends,” which taps into the Christian dimension of sustainable spirituality and at the same time, given its deliberate vagueness, sustains the wide range of possibilities beyond “what we know” (Line 14). It is the sestet that introduces the vocabulary of transcendent spirituality and offers the affirmation of eternity.

Meter

Approaching the stark reality of death can trigger a maelstrom of negative emotions. Longfellow seeks to calm the tumult of that emotional register in the poem—the reassuringly metrical lines create the illusion of order, a defiant resistance to the spiral into the noise and confusion as death approaches.

Longfellow’s sonnet follows the anticipated metrical patterns of a Petrarchan sonnet. Each line is set to iambic pentameter, although lines play subtle variations on that metrical pattern to avoid monotony. In addition, the poem uses the device known as enjambment, that is, the continuation of an idea from one line to the next without using the absolute of end punctation, or easing the flow using commas (there is actually only a single period in the sonnet), all to prevent the sonnet from stopping, thus refusing to acknowledge in its meter the reality of endings.

The lines are each executed in pairs of unstressed/stressed sounds, five such beat units to each line. For instance:

By promises of others in their stead (Line 7)

Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay (Line 12)

The metrical patterns are additionally reinforced by the tight rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet. In the octave, the lines rhyme ABBAABBA; in the sestet, CDECDE. The rhyming is carefully maintained, reassuring and obvious like a child’s verse. The overall impression of the sonnet is a carefully timed and rhymed poem set against the rising fear of approaching death. In a poem about mortality, that measured meter provides a reassuring sense that the body and its pleasures and pains are easing toward termination, but the mind itself maintains intellectual restraint. Thus, the meter itself helps contain, direct, and control the inevitable panic or alarming anxieties over death.

Voice

The voice here is at once intensely personal and deliberately impersonal. There is no doubt this is a poem written by a man who understands that death is advancing closer and closer. However, the poem refuses to introduce solipsistic anxieties particular to Longfellow, the poet who would be dead within four years of penning the sonnet. Longfellow does not personalize the voice by introducing his own life experiences of death as cruel, intrusive, premature, and agonizing. Rather assuming the august position of Public Poet, which by 1878 Longfellow certainly was, he launches away from his own experience to create a verse that speaks to a reader similarly haunted by death. The voice of the poem reflects the earnestness of the Poet’s offer of consolation in the face of death. This earnestness will make Longfellow’s poem suspect by the next generation of Modernist poets suspicious of the very idea of wisdom. Hence the more sincere and hopeful Longfellow becomes, the more irrelevant and sentimental he would appear to poets of the early-20th century, relegating Longfellow to the margins of American poets as a minor presence despite his overwhelming influence in his own time.