One of my grandmother’s favorite New England poets was Henry Wordsworth Longfellow. After she died from misunderstood COVID-19 complications, I found a book of Wordsworth poems on a bookshelf, which was chipping paint and collecting dust, in my grandparent’s Revolutionary War-era farmhouse in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.
My grandfather was a surgeon in Wilmington, Delaware. He went to Dartmouth and Harvard Medical School. My grandparents had five kids, a vacation home in Lyndonville, Vermont, where my grandmother grew up (though she would have preferred a place in Nantucket), and a membership to the country club in their native area along the border of Pennsylvania and Delaware, right around Joe Biden’s stomping ground.
They were from a different era, and I do not agree with all of their politics (to say the least). But as an only child with two full-time working parents, I found solace in my grandparent’s home, learning from them something about the roots of American culture.
With that said, maybe I am a bit basic but something that stuck with me from Longfellow, as a 25-year-old woman finally seeing her worth in the world, was his famed poem “A Psalm for Life.”
While at home last summer, preparing for Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, I memorized the whole thing and began walking around the hay-field-laden property reciting the work to my parents’ two golden retrievers: Whiskey and Rye. The poem hangs on my Upper West Side refrigerator to this day.
Longfellow was a co-founder of The Atlantic magazine in 1857. (He would be happy with their success.) Today, one of the liberal-leaning magazine’s newsletters informed me that Longfellow penned the very poem behind our long weekend: Memorial Day.
“Declaration Day,” published in The Atlantic in 1882, was one of Longfellow’s last written works. Longfellow wrote the poem as an honored remembrance of all the soldiers who died in the Civil War. He advocated for the country to remember their loss and their sacrifice to afford freedom for all.
Below are two poems: “Declaration Day” and “A Psalm for Life”
“Declaration Day”
Henry Wordsworth Longfellow
Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest
On this Field of the Grounded Arms,
Where foes no more molest,
Nor sentry’s shot alarms!
Ye have slept on the ground before,
And started to your feet
At the cannon’s sudden roar,
Or the drum’s redoubling beat.
But in this camp of Death
No sound your slumber breaks;
Here is no fevered breath,
No wound that bleeds and aches.
All is repose and peace,
Untrampled lies the sod;
The shouts of battle cease,
It is the Truce of God!
Rest, comrades, rest and sleep!
The thoughts of men shall be
As sentinels to keep
Your rest from danger free.
Your silent tents of green
We deck with fragrant flowers
Yours has the suffering been,
The memory shall be ours.
A Psalm of Life
Henry Wordsworth Longfellow
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, –act in the live Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
Ashley Elizabeth Miller 
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