Poem Thread?

[Occhidiangela]

I will have poetry in my life. :D

Hopefully posting this will help me get it off of my chest.

The Wreck of the Hesperus

"WRECK OF THE HESPERUS"

It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintery sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.

The Skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his mouth,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West, now South.

Then up and spake an old Sailor,
Had sailed the Spanish Main,
"I pray thee, put into yonder port,
for I fear a hurricane.

"Last night the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!"
The skipper, he blew whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.

Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the Northeast,
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.

Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable's length.

"Come hither! come hither! my little daughter,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.

"O father! I hear the church bells ring,
Oh, say, what may it be?"
"Tis a fog-bell on a rock bound coast!" --
And he steered for the open sea.

"O father! I hear the sound of guns;
Oh, say, what may it be?"
Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!"

"O father! I see a gleaming light.
Oh say, what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That saved she might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave,
On the Lake of Galilee.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe.

And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf,
On the rocks and hard sea-sand.

The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's Woe!

Some background:
Longfellow liked using local history and lore in his poems, and “The Wreck of the Hesperus” is based on two events: an actual shipwreck at Norman’s Woe, after which a body like the one in the poem was found, and the real wreck of the Hesperus, which took place near Boston. Despite that fact, the poem is so well known that the loop road leading close to Norman’s Woe from Route 127 is named Hesperus Ave. Interestingly, Longfellow only saw Norman’s Woe for the first time shortly before his death. “The Wreck of the Hesperus” was written in 1839.

An unflattering critique.
: "The Wreck of the Hesperus" is prototypical Longfellow, pure 19th century sentimentalism, with all the inverted word order and overwrought emotions connected with that school of verse. While such poems have been sneered at for most of a century now, they were the popular culture of the time, and The Wreck was wildly popular in its day. Many a middle-class American home had books of Longfellow in the parlor, and many people could recite this verse by heart. The poem is mostly forgotten now, but the title lives on as a widely used phrase representing disastrous wreckage.

Opinion: Longfellow's "WRECK OF THE HESPERUS" must rank high amongst the list of poems that should never have been written.
I recited it in class (made two word errors) for an "A" on an English assignment my junior year in high school. I tend to prefer "There once was a man from Nantucket" and others in that genre.

Occhi