A Psalm Of Life

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” is one of the most beloved and most often anthologized poems in the American literary canon. With its inspirational message of encouragement despite life’s considerable vicissitudes and its affirmation of the endurance of the soul despite the difficult reality of death, the poem remains a staple in literature classes more than 150 years after its publication. Its stirring lines, memorized by generations of schoolchildren, have been generously quoted at funerals, graduations, and weddings. Published anonymously in one of New York City’s most prestigious magazines, Knickerbocker, in the fall of 1838 (Longfellow, then a struggling poet in his early 30s, reportedly was promised $5.00 for the poem, money he famously never received), the poem is ostensibly an interior monologue, a celebration of the joys and sorrows of living directed against a lector in church who sings or reads Christian psalms that demand life be endured as a grim and thankfully brief pilgrimage to the rewards and consolations of the afterlife. Now recognized as one of the grandest works of the Fireside Poets, the first generation of poets and essayists centered largely around Boston, born not British subjects but rather American citizens who sought in their work to mentor and inspire their new nation, “A Psalm of Life” counsels commitment to moral integrity and to life’s duties as a way to make purposeful the brief span that is the measure of any lifetime.