Fireside poetry #2

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).