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

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, August 20th, 2025.

Today's poem is by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and it's called The Fire of Driftwood.

We featured this poem on the show before, but it's been a good four or five years, maybe more.

In many ways, it is classic Longfellow.

There are these melancholy themes, meditations on loss and on old age, but it's a really cleverly constructed poem, the way that the governing metaphor

shifts as the poem builds. At first, the visual emphasis is upon structures, houses, and buildings.

And then that gives way to a discussion of the behavior of

hearts and the metaphor of paths and roads that split and diverge. So we go from stationary

structures to avenues and paths by which one travels. And then from these narrow,

linear paths, we move on to the paths of the sea, which are wide, broad, almost unlimited,

which seems to guide even the reasoning or the reflection of the speaker,

because it's at that point he begins to fully accept the many partings of ways, the many

ventures embarked upon that will never come back together, that will never come to fruition, even about which

one may never hear a final report. And then the poem settles into this final image of the

glowing fire, like the driftwood there on the shore, there is this fire that burns within

the speaker. Whether the speaker is more like a house or more like a ship, they have one thing

in common, and that is fire inside them will slowly consume them.

And so it seems fitting that that is the image, the closing image, as the speaker perhaps settles.

His mind has wandered.

It is ranged far and wide, but now comes back home to contemplate the ultimate and inevitable end of all things.

But it's also circling back to the warmth and comfort, camaraderie even, associated with this fire at the beginning of the poem.

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