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Longfellow and His Cross of Snow

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

James M. Cox
James M. Cox*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
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Extract

Longfellow's Sonnet, “The Cross of Snow,” written eighteen years after his wife's death and left among his papers, has survived to become one of his most admired productions. Samuel Longfellow, the poet's brother and biographer, first brought it to the world's attention, publishing it in the second volume of the biography. Along with the poem, he added some biographical details which to this day usually serve in paraphrased form as a preface to anthologized appearances of the poem. Writing of Longfellow's grief-stricken anguish during the months following Mrs. Longfellow's death, his brother observed:

In one of his early letters Mr. Longfellow had said: ‘With me all deep feelings are silent ones.’ It was so of the deepest. No word of his bitter sorrow and anguish found expression in verse. But he felt the need of some continuous and tranquil occupation for his thoughts; and after some months he summoned the resolution to take up again the task of translating Dante,—begun, it may be remembered, years before, and long laid aside. For a time he translated a canto each day. . . . Eighteen years afterward, looking over, one day, an illustrated book of Western scenery, his attention was arrested by a picture of that mysterious mountain upon whose lonely, lofty breast the snow lies in long furrows that make a rude but wonderfully clear image of a vast cross. At night as he looked upon the pictured countenance that hung upon his chamber wall, his thoughts framed themselves into the verses that follow. He put them away in his portfolio, where they were found after his death.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 75 , Issue 1 , March 1960 , pp. 97 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960

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References

1 Samuel Longfellow, ed., Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with Extracts from His Journals and Correspondence, 2 vols. (Boston, 1886), ii, 372. Hereafter cited as Life.

2 “Divina Commedia IV” first appeared in Longfellow's translation of The Divine Comedy, published in 1867 by Tick-nor and Fields. Although fourth in the sonnet sequence, it was written more than a year later than any of the other five; moreover—as his journal entry for 6 May 1867 makes clear—the composition of the sonnet was for Longfellow the final act of the long labor of translating Dante: “Showed Fields a new sonnet which I wrote last night, and which is to go into the Purgatory. The Dante work is now all done,—the last word, and the final corrections, all in the printer's hands” (Final Memorials of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Samuel Longfellow [Boston, 1887], p. 91). More than twelve years later, Longfellow wrote “The Cross of Snow,” giving the date of composition as 10 July 1879, eighteen years to the day after Mrs. Longfellow's death.

3 Quoted in Lawrance Thompson, Young Longfellow (New York, 1938) p. 285.

4 Thompson, p. 422. Longfellow made this observation on the first anniversary of his engagement.

5 Thompson, p. 338.

6 On 21 March 1843, Longfellow wrote to Mrs. Andrews Norton: “How different from this gossip is the divine Dante, with which I begin the morning ! I write a few lines every day before breakfast. It is the first thing I do,—the morning prayer, the key-note of the day …” (Life, ii, 12).

7 Perhaps the clearest indication of how much Longfellow saw his own career in relation to Dante's is to be found in “Mezzo Cammin,” the sonnet (written in 1842) in which Longfellow defines his own poetic failures and aspirations against the Dantesque implications of the title. And the night before composing one of his finest, and most personal, poems, “My Lost Youth,” Longfellow recorded in his journal: “A day of pain; cowering over the fire. At night as I lie in bed, a poem comes into my mind,—a memory of Portland, my native town, the city by the sea” (Life, ii, 255–256). Immediately following the entry, Longfellow quoted Fran-cesca's speech in which she mentions having been born in Ravenna, the city by the sea (Inferno, v. 97) : “Siede la terra dove nato fui / Sulla marina.” By itself such a quotation would mean nothing, but in the whole texture of Longfellow's allusions to and quotations from Dante it provides another example of his instinctive wish to define himself by, or to discover his identity iii, The Divine Comedy,

8 I do not mean that Longfellow was unacquainted with Dante's work prior to 1836, but that the period from 1837 to 1843 marks the beginning of his intense and creative devotion to Dante's poetry. For an account of Longfellow's interest in Dante see Emilio Goggio, “Longfellow and Dante,” in Thirly-ninth, Fortieth, and Forty-first Annual Reports of the Dante Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), pp. 25–34.

9 Quoted in Mrs. Longfellow: Selected Letters and Journals of Fanny Appleton Longfellow (1817-61), ed. Edward Wagen-knecht (New York, 1956), p. 242.

10 Paul Elmer More, one of the first critics to see Longfellow's genuine achievement as a sonneteer, recognized the confessional quality of Longfellow's sonnets. He contended that the best refutation to the criticism that Longfellow lacked power to see his limitations “is in the poems of Longfellow, especially those in the sonnet form, which from the time of Petrarch, and of Shakespeare in English, has been the chosen vehicle for poetic confession” (“The Centenary of Longfellow,” in Slielbutne Essays, Fifth Series [New York, 1908], p. ISO).

11 Final Memorials, p. 91.

12 The kind of radical reorientation Longfellow had to make in accommodating himself to Dante's world is indirectly but all the more dramatically suggested in the following contrast. On 22 January 1836 Longfellow wrote to his closest friend, G. W. Greene: “For my own part, I feel at this moment more than ever that fame must be looked upon only as an accessory. If it has ever been a principal object with me—which I doubt—it is so no more” (Life, i, 218). Against this pious but certainly sincere and characteristic sentiment, there is Longfellow's equally characteristic response to Dante, made on 9 January 1840: “Read five cantos in Dante's Inferno. I am struck with the prevailing desire of fame everywhere heard. … This was the longing in the soul of Dante, finding its expression everywhere. … I know of no book so fearfully expressive of human passions as this” (Life, i, 344).