A Poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: ‘Santa Filomena’

One technique to achieve perception into somebody’s psyche is to learn what they wrote once they have been 13. For Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, that’s his very first printed poem, “The Battle of Lovell’s Pond,” which acknowledges fallen troopers whose “names are engraven on honor’s vibrant crest.” Humbly signed with simply “Henry,” the poem foreshadows the sentimental however unambiguous morality for which Longfellow would turn out to be recognized.

“Santa Filomena,” which he wrote for The Atlantic’s inaugural subject, in November 1857, attests to his lifelong perception within the worth of sacrifice. Then in his 50s, Longfellow had been a professor at Harvard and was, in keeping with David Barber, a former poetry editor of The Atlantic, “incontestably probably the most celebrated poet within the land”—common for his accessible legends. As O. B. Frothingham wrote in 1882, “The poems of Longfellow have been in all households that made the smallest pretense to literary cultivation … It was poetry of the center in its peaceable, not in its martial, moods, and it met these moods not lackadaisically, however hopefully, cheerily, bravely.”

This specific poem—the primary of dozens that Longfellow would publish within the journal—commemorates Florence Nightingale, whose service as a nurse in the course of the Crimean Warfare helped set requirements of sanitation and affected person care within the career. Right here, Longfellow canonizes her because the “girl with a lamp,” bringing the reader down hospital hallways as she pushes by way of the “glimmering of gloom” to are inclined to wounded troopers. Longfellow means that Nightingale can be immortalized for instance of “Heroic womanhood,” as a result of the sunshine she carries will proceed to forged its rays into the longer term “From portals of the previous.”

Longfellow’s poems stay a central pillar of the American story, reminding us of the civic values that he hoped would information and uplift every of his readers. Maybe the supply of the sunshine referenced in “Santa Filomena” isn’t the lamp in any respect however, fairly, Nightingale herself.

You possibly can zoom in on the pages right here and right here.