Despite my inveterate bicycling and my wife’s love of nature walks, I’ve never been much of a hiker, and I’m very much not so in my old age. None-the-less I was charmed this winter when I saw this short poem because it appealed to my mental wandering. Walk with me: it’s not all that long a hike to a short audio piece.

When I saw today’s poem, I immediately noted that its translator from Goethe’s original German was the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Let me reassure the poetry hardcore who might be reading this post that Longfellow was far from my interests when I started this project. While 19^th century worthies Whitman and Dickinson remain staples of American poetry, Longfellow was to me only a schoolchild’s memory — and at that, not even a literary anthology schoolbook memory. My Midcentury-Modern anthologies of poetry in English didn’t concern themselves much with him, so I recalled only the Longfellow of illustrated poems for children that predated Dr. Seuss’ ascendency, Midnight rides, patriots at the bridge, culturally appropriated native Americans epics in stalwart meters. Longfellow’s Wikipedia page, reflecting critical consensus, still makes the case to downgrade him — and that’s hard to do, to downgrade someone who is now largely overlooked. The judgement handed down can be summarized: you don’t know him, and it’s probably best to keep it that way.

How did Longfellow come to me then? Part way into this Project I visited Massachusetts, planning to see the historic sites in Boston. While in Boston I decided to add a visit to the Washington/Longfellow house in Cambridge. This was a toss-in, yet it was while I was there that I heard about Longfellow’s life and I started to pay a bit more attention to the range of poetry he wrote.

While on that tour, our group was walked through Longfellow’s study where he wrote. I noticed right away that he had something that 21^st century Americans would recognize immediately as a modern adaptation for intellectual work: a standing desk. If you must be deskbound, current theories hold, it’s best for your body to spend some of it on your feet during its mental wanderings.

The other thing that stood out was a statue on the desk. It’s not a small little desktop trinket that some of us keep on our own desks,* but something you could easily see across the room from behind the tour ropes. “Who’s the statue on the desk of?” I asked our guide.

“Goethe.” They replied.

If Longfellow has some incontrovertible objective value remaining, it’s that he established the idea of a preeminent American national poet. Those children’s books were thinly veiled citizenship lessons, direct appeals to America’s nationhood after all. So, what’s up with this German poet?

Longfellow, born of a generation where many living adults knew the American Revolution firsthand, was tasking himself with finding what could be an American poetry. What materials did he gather for this?

It’s likely he knew British literature of his time well, but he was officially a professor of Modern European Languages, and while still a young man he taught himself French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and German. He read literature in those languages, translated works from them into English. Whitman and Dickinson largely looked inward (within national and mental borders) for their remarkable American poetry, Longfellow was (as far as influences) a proper internationalist.

He could have decorated his desk with former householder: George Washington I suppose, or that other Washington who was a pioneering American literary figure, Washington Irving. Nope. The man he wanted staring at him when he stood and wrote was this formidable German poet and polymath.

Longfellow’s desk, and Goethe is right up in his grill when he wrote there.

.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was not a model for a faint-hearted writer, but perhaps one of the things from Goethe’s overstuffed portfolio might have interested Longfellow: Volkspoesie, “Folk poetry.” The idea here was that shared history, mythic tales, and interests of ordinary people experiencing their landscape was a nation-forming cultural foundation. Here’s a connection Longfellow might have felt: France, England, Spain, and Portugal had been nations for centuries by Goethe and Longfellow’s time: but Germany was not yet a nation in the modern sense, and Longfellow’s United States was only freshly one.**

“Wanderers Nightsong”  is not a grand, nation-building poem however. It’s a tiny little lyric, really only concerned with an internationally-known experience of being outside under one’s own power, perhaps by choice recreationally, perhaps in some outside-directed travel or need to escape, but anyway alone enough in one’s landscape that all things are silent. You can hear your own breath, feel your own accumulation of footsteps, and the landscape says: rest with us.

This means that Longfellow has a delicate task. The thoughts contained in Goethe’s German are not unique — indeed, they wish to speak of a shared experience. Nor are there striking images or clever language effects in the poem. No strange worlds or visions are portrayed. The song-sense here, even on the silent page, is the poem’s substance. Like Hank Williams’ American country song standard “I’m so Lonesome I Could Cry,”   the point here is not that the singer has seen something you haven’t seen, the point is that he sees what you’ve seen, felt what you’ve felt, and you, even reading silently, can sing it with them. Therefore, Longfellow chose to keep Goethe’s German rhyme scheme in his translation to English so that it continues to sing on the page in its new language.

Schubert fans will tell you, I’m a follower not a lieder.

.

Longfellow’s choice here is the right one, and I’ve honored it while slightly modifying his syntax and usage. You can read Longfellow’s original text and Goethe’s German at this link. Coincidentally, the poem’s original germ was written on a wall, a fact shared by “Smells Like Teen Spirit”  and this poem presented here a few years back. My performance is not complicated — it’s folk-song like — though the chord structure uses some less-common chord extensions. I do use one of my standbys, the simple sustain-pedal piano notes which testify to my absolute non-mastery of that instrument while wanting to make use of its sonorities. Like some other poems I’ve presented here, an accomplished composer has set this before me. You can hear my simple version with English lyrics using the audio player gadget you should see below. No gadget?  This highlighted link is an alternative way that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*I used to keep a sentimental ceramic rabbit that was a gift from my late wife on my writing desk. More recently, a Lego figure of Shakespeare my child assembled and gave to me.

**Yes, nationalism, and in particular German or American nationalism, has its downsides — but the case that it’s foundational to establishing a civic bond can be mooted without denying it’s plausible faults. I should also note for students: my knowledge of German literature is scant, despite my mother having been bilingual in her childhood, and her grandparents speaking German in their home and church. This is a blog written by a “layman” explorer of poetry and music, my scholarship is spotty, though my interests are broad.