About Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882) was an American writer and instructor whose works incorporate "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline. He was additionally the main American to interpret Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and was one of the five Fireside Poets from New England.
Summary of A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth:
A Psalm of Life" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow depicts the motivation behind life, and how one should handle the distress and battles along the way.
The poem starts with the speaker contradicting an audience who wants to explain life to him as a matter of number and figures. Whatever remains of the poem is dedicated to the speaker attempting to demonstrate this obscure individual off-base. He depicts the way in which he trusts that regardless of what death brings, the spirit will never be obliterated. Because of this, it is important to do all one can in life to make one's situation, and that of others, better.
The speaker arrives at the end that he, and the audience, must be prepared at any time for death, conflict, or any inconvenience tossed at them. They should face life, and make the best consistently.
Analysis of A Psalm of Life:
The speaker of this piece starts by soliciting something from his listener. He is near the purpose of asking, frantic that his most noticeably bad feelings of trepidation (which will be uncovered as the poem proceeds) are not affirmed.
He is asking his listener now to "not" disclose to him that "Life is but rather an empty dream." He doesn't want this individual to separate the statistics, actualities, and "numbers" of life, trying to comprehend it. The speaker does not see, nor does he want to understand the world in that way.
In the second 50% of the quatrain, and for most of the poem in the future, the speaker is endeavoring to battle back against life can be separated into the level, emotionless, numerics. He expresses that a "soul is dead" that is ready to think about the world in this way. The individual who analyzes the world so deliberately (and in this specific manner) is committing an error.
The narrator continues on with what reads as a desperate attempt to contradict what he was afraid of in the first stanza. He exclaims for any to hear that “Life is real!” And it is “earnest!” He is enthusiastically supportive of the idea that life is worth living and that it is worth something real. He believes that there is a reason to be alive other than getting to the grave.
He elaborates on this belief when he describes the ending of life as belonging solely to the body, and not to the soul. When the words, “Dust thou art, to dust returnest” were spoken, he says, they were not in reference to “the soul.”
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