Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, November 12, 2024.

Today's poem is a selection from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem published in 1855, The Song of Hiawatha,

which is based in part on his real friendship with an Ojibwe native chief.

And it's about the adventures of an Ojibwe warrior chieftain named Hiawatha,

lives in the Great Lakes region at the time just before the European settling and colonization of that region.

This selection comes from part 10 of the poem,

Hiawatha's wooing, in which Hiawatha goes according to woo the arrow maker's daughter, the beautiful mini-haha or laughing water.

There are a few things in general that I love about the song of Hiawatha.

The meter is a trochaic meter, stressed, unstressed, which gives it this beating heart drumming kind of rhythm that is always

urgent and propelling you forward.

Troki comes from the Greek word for to run.

Trecho, I run.

And there's always this sort of leaning forward, this forward inclination that keeps you

moving, keeps this momentum and builds this expectation. And the way that Longfellow uses and

arranges words in this poem, they're like spells. They have this magic quality. He layers them. He builds parallel structures into his verse that really lets you sit with and savor the words, almost as if he's turning them over like a gem and viewing the ideas or the images from several angles before moving on.

In the entirety of this poem, words have such a magic and such a beautiful quality.

And sometimes he will give you the English word.

And then alongside it, he will then give you the native word for the same term or object or idea,

which just deepens that sense. In this section,

there's a beautiful structural thing going on in which both the Aero Maker's daughter and

minihaha are lost in their own separate thoughts and their thoughts are oriented in different directions.

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