The poem, “Autumn”, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, is a short poem that describes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s views of autumn. I think that he really likes the season autumn because of the way he describes the season. He compares the season to an emperor named Charlemagne.
“Thou standest, like imperial Charlemagne,
Upon thy bridge of gold; thy royal hand
Outstretched with benedictions o’er the land,
Blessing the farms through all thy vast domain!” ( Longfellow 5 – 8 )
He describes Autumn as an emperor standing on a bridge of gold, blessing the farms that are in its domain. I think that he says this because in the autumn, the leaves change colors and turn golden so that could be what Longfellow meant as “a bridge of gold”. Another thing that happens in the autumn that Longfellow referenced in this poem is how all the plants grow and all the crops are harvested. “Blessing the farms through all thy vast domain” means that when autumn comes, the farms are blessed because they are harvested. The line “Thou standest, like imperial Charlemagne” describes autumn standing like an emperor. I think that since Longfellow described autumn in this way that it means that he probably really likes autumn.
The poem that I read today was by the fireside poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem was called “The Children’s Hour”. When analyzing this poem for its literal meaning, this poem sounds really creepy.If you look at it literally, it talks about an hour where children devour you with kisses and tie you up with hugs and then you capture them in a dungeon that is in your heart until your dungeon crumbles. It sounds really weird when you interpret it like that, but when you look at it figuratively, the poem sounds a lot better. The “Children’s Hour” that the poem talks about I am assuming, is when the children are about to go to bed and the narrator of the poem gets interrupted from his work by his children saying goodnight to him. His children are very young and energetic. I know this because in the 6th line the poem says “The patter of little feet” (Longfellow 6) and in lines 17 through 20, it says
“A sudden rush from the stairway,
A sudden raid from the hall!
By three doors left unguarded
They enter my castle wall!” (Longfellow 17 - 20)
The children enter into the room where the narrator is working very energetically pretending to attack him. They attack him with hugs and kisses. The narrator says that when the children are attacking him, he is reminded of the Bingham of Bishop. The narrator talks about the Bingham of Bishop and his mouse tower. According to the literary criticism that I read which was written by Randall Huff, the poem is referring to a story of a man who collected a bunch of grain until everyone in the town except for him starved. So he collected all the grain and lived by himself until eventually some mice got in his tower and ate all the grain, which is why his tower is called the mouse tower (Huff par. 1). I think that the poem talks about this because the children were a lot smaller than the guy so he felt like they were just little mice crawling on him.
In the literary criticism, Huff says that Longfellow the names Edith, Alice, and Allegra, the names that Longfellow used for the children in the poem, are the names of his own children. I think that this poem shows how Longfellow feels about his children. I think that he really loves his children and that although he probably works very hard, he enjoys the time that he is able to spend with his children. You can tell that he enjoys joking around with his children daughters because he plays along with them when they attack him. He pretends that they are bandits,
“Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti, Because you have scaled the wall, Such an old mustache as I am Is not a match for you all!” (Longfellow 29-32)
Longfellow shows that he loves his daughters very much in lines 34 – 40:
“And will not let you depart, But put you down into the dungeon In the round-tower of my heart.
And there will I keep you forever, Yes, forever and a day, Till the walls shall crumble to ruin, And moulder in dust away!” (Longfellow 34-40)
He threatens to capture them and lock them up, but instead of a scary dungeon he describes “the round tower of my heart”. He says that he will keep them there “forever and a day” meaning that he will always love them.
This poem contains the common romanticism characteristic of youthful innocence. The narrator in this poem starts out as being very serious but towards the end, when the children arrive, he becomes more youthful and innocent when he plays along with them. It also has the theme of love and family which is common in a lot of the fireside poems.
"Children's Hour, The by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow." PoemHunter.Com - Thousands of Poems and Poets.. Poetry Search Engine. 31 Dec. 2002. Web. 07 Dec. 2011.
Huff, Randall. "'The Children's Hour'." The Facts On File Companion to American Poetry, vol. 1. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. (accessed December 7, 2011).
“The Devil and Tom Walker” by Washington Irving, is a tale written in the romanticism period. It displays many characteristics of romanticism. In a lot of writings during this time period, nature is a big theme. It was important in this time and you can tell by how much it is displayed in their writing. For example, in “The Devil and Tom Walker”, when Tom first ventures out into the forest, the author uses great detail to describe the appearance of the forest.“The swamp was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high, which made it dark at noonday… It was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and mosses, where the green surface often betrayed the traveler into a gulf of black, smothering mud; there were also dark and stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bullfrog, and the water snake, where the trunks of pines and hemlocks lay half drowned, half rotting, looking like alligators sleeping in the mire.” (Irving 242). I like all the details that authors use in this time period to describe nature, it makes the writing a lot more interesting and better to read.
When comparing “The Devil and Tom Walker” to “Rip Van Winkle”, I found a lot of similarities between the two of Washington Irving’s stories. They are both a type of legend. “The Devil and Tom Walker” is a legend that takes place in Boston, Massachusetts. “Rip Van Winkle” took place in New York. Both of these stories have the theme of the nagging wife. In “The Devil and Tom Walker”, Tom’s wife nags him about taking the devil’s deal because she is very selfish and she wants all the money for herself. The only reason that Tom does not take the Devil’s deal in the first place is because he refuses to listen to his wife. Only after she disappears does he decide to go after the Devil and take the deal. In “Rip Van Winkle”, Rip is described as a “henpecked husband” or one who is constantly nagged by his wife and is very obedient to her. Rip goes into the mountains because he wanted to get away from his wife, and that is how he ended up getting into the situation that he got into. I think that Washington Irving had kind of a messed up view of women since he keeps depicting them as nagging trouble makers.
“The Devil and Tom Walker” and “Rip Van Winkle” showed a writing style of the romanticism period. They both used a lot of detail in describing things and they also had a lot of nature themes in them. I found these tales to be a lot more interesting than any of the other things that we have been reading in this class in a while because they were a lot easier to understand than the poems of the fireside poets and they are also much more entertaining and interesting than the poems and writings of the puritan and rationalism writings.
Matthews, Washington Irving. "4. Rip Van Winkle By Washington Irving. Matthews, Brander. 1907. The Short-Story." Bartleby.com: Great Books Online -- Quotes, Poems, Novels, Classics and Hundreds More. Bartleby.com, Apr. 2011. Web. 05 Dec. 2011. .
Nature and spirituality play a very large role in the cycle of life and death. If you think about it, pretty much your whole life you live around nature. Nature is everywhere you look. It is there when you are born and it is there when you die. Nature's role in the circle of life is very important. The circle of life is the cycle that everyone goes through of being born, living your life, and then dying. When you are born, it is a natural process. You live your life and all around you there is nature. Man tries to separate from nature a lot in life, but it is not possible to completely separate your self from nature because it is literally everywhere. As soon as you walk out side of your house, you are back in nature. I enjoy spending time outside and in nature so a lot of my life is spent with nature. When you die, you return back to nature. You are buried in the ground and therefore, you return back to nature. In my environmental science class, we are learning about the circle of life and how when an animal dies, it provides food for other animals. When an animal dies in the forest, part of their body can be eaten by other animals or decomposers and the other part of the animal's body goes into the ground to become a part of the soil which provides food for trees and other plants. The trees and plants then provide food for other animals.I think that this is a good example of nature playing its role in the circle of life. I think that humans try very hard to detach themselves from nature all throughout their life, by living in houses with air conditioning and couches and televisions and indoor plumbing instead of outside in nature, but I think that in the end, we all return back to nature when we die and are buried in the ground. I think that nature is always present in the circle of life.
