Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Voices of the Night

When the hours of Day are numbered,
 And the Voices of the Night
Wake the better soul that slumbered,
 To a holy, calm delight:
II.

Victorian parlor setting

The gaslit parlor with firelight is the specific scene—this is before electric lights, in the transitional hour between daylight and lamplight when shadows dominate.

Ere the evening lamps are lighted,
 And, like phantoms grim and tall,
Shadows from the fitful fire-light
 Dance upon the parlor wall:
III.
Then the forms of the departed
 Enter at the open door;
The beloved ones, the true-hearted,
 Come to visit me once more.
IV.
He, the young and strong, who cherished
 Noble longings for the strife;
By the road-side fell and perished,

Death by exhaustion

"By the road-side fell and perished"—not a dramatic death, but collapse from the grind of daily life. The military metaphor ("march of life") makes ordinary survival sound like warfare.

 Weary with the march of life!
V.
They, the holy ones and weakly,
 Who the cross of suffering bore,
Folded their pale hands so meekly,
 Spake with us on earth no more!
VI.

Longfellow's wife

"The Being beauteous" is Mary Potter Longfellow, who died in 1835 after a miscarriage. He wrote this poem in 1839, four years into widowhood.

And with them the Being beauteous,
 Who unto my youth was given,
More than all things else to love me,
 And is now a saint in heaven.
VII.
With a slow and noiseless footstep,
 Comes that messenger divine,
Takes the vacant chair beside me,

Physical hallucination

"Takes the vacant chair beside me"—he keeps a chair empty for her. The ghost doesn't float; she sits down and takes his hand like a real visitor.

 Lays her gentle hand in mine.
VIII.
And she sits and gazes at me,
 With those deep and tender eyes,
Like the stars so still and saint-like,
 Looking downward from the skies.
IX.

Silent communication

"Uttered not, yet comprehended"—the entire conversation happens without words. He reads rebuke and blessing in her imagined presence.

Uttered not, yet comprehended,
 Is the spirit's voiceless prayer,
Soft rebukes, in blessings ended,
 Breathing from her lips of air.
X.
O, though oft depressed and lonely,
 All my fears are laid aside,
If I but remember only

Stoic consolation

The logic: if good people died and endured it, I can endure living. He's using his dead as moral examples to survive depression.

 Such as these have lived and died!
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Longfellow's Grief Practice

CONTEXT Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's first wife, Mary Potter, died in 1835 after a miscarriage, leaving him devastated at age 28. This poem, written in 1839, documents his nightly ritual of communing with her ghost. He would later lose his second wife, Frances, in a fire in 1861—but this poem captures early widowhood, when grief was still fresh enough to require daily management.

The poem is structured as a séance without spiritualism. Longfellow doesn't claim Mary's ghost is real; he's describing a deliberate imaginative practice. Notice the specific staging: the twilight hour ("Ere the evening lamps are lighted"), the firelight creating shadows, the vacant chair kept ready. He's engineering the conditions for hallucination.

The "Being beauteous" section (stanza VI) uses telling language: she was "given" to him in youth and is "now a saint in heaven." This frames their marriage as a temporary loan, not a permanent possession. The religious vocabulary (saint, divine messenger, holy) transforms grief into devotional practice—he's not haunted, he's visited.

What makes this Victorian rather than Romantic: the ghost offers "soft rebukes" and moral guidance. She's not passionate or longing; she's a civilizing influence who makes him behave better. The final stanza reveals the function: remembering the dead helps him endure depression ("though oft depressed and lonely"). This is grief as self-improvement, very much in line with 19th-century mourning culture's emphasis on the dead as moral exemplars.

The Other Ghosts

Before his wife appears, Longfellow catalogs other dead visitors in stanzas IV-V. These matter because they establish a pattern: everyone dies of weariness, not drama.

Stanza IV describes a young man who "fell and perished, / Weary with the march of life." The military metaphor ("strife," "march") makes daily existence sound like a campaign that killed him. He didn't die *in* battle; he died *of* the march itself. This is death by exhaustion, by the grinding nature of ordinary life.

Stanza V's "holy ones and weakly" who "bore the cross of suffering" continues the pattern. These people died of chronic illness or hardship, "folding their pale hands meekly"—a gesture of both prayer and surrender. The phrase "Spake with us on earth no more" emphasizes the silence of death; they stopped talking, stopped participating.

This catalog matters because it reframes mortality: people don't die heroically, they die tired. When Longfellow's wife appears after this inventory, she's part of a larger company of the exhausted dead. The poem's consolation (final stanza) works through this logic: if they could endure unto death, he can endure mere depression. It's a grim calculus, but it's the math that keeps him going through the "Voices of the Night."