Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Tide Rises, Tide Falls"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2023

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator. His original works include the poems "Paul Revere's Ride", "The Song of Hiawatha", and "Evangeline". He was the first American to completely translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and was one of the fireside poets from New England.

Longfellow wrote many lyric poems known for their musicality and often presenting stories of mythology and legend. He became the most popular American poet of his day and had success overseas. He has been criticized for imitating European styles and writing poetry that was too sentimental.

—Bio via Wikipedia

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:05.2	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, October 19, 2003.
0:10.4	Today's poem is by the great Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and it's called The Tide Rises,
0:18.0	The Tide Falls.
0:19.9	I'll read it once, offer a few comments.
0:23.0	I'll go ahead and read it the second time.
0:27.3	The tide rises, the tide falls.
0:35.2	The tide rises, the tide falls, the twilight darkens, the curlew calls. Along the sea sands damp and brown, the traveler hastens toward the town, and the tide rises, the tide falls. Darkness settles on roofs and walls, but the sea, the sea in darkness calls.
0:59.6	The little waves, with their soft white hands, efface the footprints in the sands.
1:06.0	When the tide rises, the tide falls.
1:09.9	The morning breaks, the steeds in their stalls, stamp and nay,
1:14.8	as the hostler calls. The day returns, but never more returns the traveler to the shore,
1:22.3	and the tide rises, the tide falls.
1:45.9	This is an enigmatic little poem.
1:55.7	Henry Wadsworth Longfellow a tremendously good and virtuous man,
2:03.6	nevertheless had a hard and sometimes unhappy life.
2:11.1	And often his poetry was an outlet for some of the melancholy that he felt or suffered under.
2:20.2	This poem is, I don't know, quasi melancholy.
2:24.7	It's about darkness, and so there is a kind of darkness that hovers over it.
2:33.6	But it does not have the sense of foreboding that some poems about darkness have.
2:37.5	And there's a bit of a mystery.
2:47.7	Each of the stanzas paints a little picture as like a little vignette.
	...

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