"The Village Blacksmith" is a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, first published in 1840. The poem describes a local blacksmith and his daily life. The blacksmith serves as a role model who balances his job with the role he plays with his family and community. Years after its publication, a tree mentioned in the poem was cut down and part of it was made into an armchair which was then presented to Longfellow by local schoolchildren.
The poem is about a local blacksmith. Noted as being strong, he works by the sweat of his brow and does not owe anyone anything. Children coming home from school stop to stare at him as he works, impressed by the roaring bellows and burning sparks. On Sundays, the blacksmith, a single father after the death of his wife, takes his children to church, where his daughter sings in the village choir. He goes through his life following the daily tasks assigned to him and has earned his sleep at night. The narrator concludes by thanking the blacksmith for the lessons he can teach.
Longfellow said the poem was a tribute to his ancestor Stephen Longfellow, who had been a blacksmith, a schoolmaster, then a town clerk. [1] In 1745, this ancestor was the first Longfellow to make his way to Portland, Maine, the town where the poet would be born. [2] The poem was written early in Longfellow's poetic career, around the same time he published his first collection, Voices of the Night, in 1839. The book included his poem "A Psalm of Life". On October 5, 1839, he recorded in his journal: "Wrote a new Psalm of Life. It is 'The Village Blacksmith.'" It would be another year before the poem was published, however. Longfellow wrote to his father on October 25, 1840: "There will be a kind of Ballad on a Blacksmith in the next Knickerbocker, which you may consider, if you please, as a song in praise of your ancestors at Newbury." [3]
The actual village blacksmith in the poem, however, was a Cambridge resident named Dexter Pratt, a neighbor of Longfellow's. Pratt's house is still standing at 54 Brattle Street in Cambridge. [4] Several other blacksmiths have been posited as inspirations for the character in the poem, including "The Learned Blacksmith" Elihu Burritt, to whom Longfellow once offered a scholarship to attend Harvard College. [5]
Several people, both in the United States and in England, took credit for inspiring the poem with varying amounts of evidence. The Longfellow family became annoyed with the preponderance of claims. In 1922, the poet's son Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow responded to these people in his book Random Memories. In a section called "Quips and Cranks", he wrote:
A short time ago I saw in an English newspaper that the “village smithy” was in a certain English village that was named; as a matter of fact, as everybody knows, it was on Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts. [6]
"The Village Blacksmith" was first published in the November 1840 issue of The Knickerbocker . [7] It was soon after printed as part of Longfellow's poetry collection Ballads and Other Poems in 1841. [8] The collection, which also included "The Wreck of the Hesperus", was instantly popular. [9] Scholar Karen L. Kilcup suggests that the poem's popularity, like Longfellow's later poem "Paul Revere's Ride", reflects contemporary Americans' need for heroic national figures. [10]
In 1879, years after the publication of "The Village Blacksmith", the local schoolchildren in Cambridge, Massachusetts presented Longfellow with an armchair made from "the spreading chestnut tree" in the poem which had recently been cut down. [11] Under the cushion of the chair is a brass plate on which is inscribed, in part: "This chair made from the wood of the spreading chestnut-tree is presented as an expression of his grateful regard and veneration by the children of Cambridge". [12] From then on, Longfellow made it a rule to allow schoolchildren to be admitted into his study to see the chair. [13] He also composed a poem to commemorate his gift called "From my Arm-Chair". The site on Brattle Street in Cambridge where the tree once stood is now designated with a stone marker. [14]
"The Village Blacksmith" is written in six line stanzas alternating between iambic tetrameter and trimeter with a regularity of cadence and rhyme that mimics the stability invoked in the poem's narrative. [15] The title character of the poem is presented as an "everyman" and a role model: he balances his commitments to work, the community, and his family. [16] The character is presented as an iconic tradesman who is embedded in the history of the town and its defining institutions because he is a longtime resident with deeply rooted strength, as symbolized by the "spreading chestnut tree". [17] Longfellow uses the poem to glorify and celebrate a humble, plain person, much as John Greenleaf Whittier does in his poem "The Barefoot Boy". [18] Further, Simon Bronner notes that, like Nathaniel Hawthorne's woodcarver character in "Drowne's Wooden Image", Longfellow is praising the craftsman in a time of industrialization. [19]
The poem, along with several others by Longfellow, was translated into Spanish by Colombian poet Rafael Pombo. [20] In several interviews, baseball player and manager Billy Southworth noted that his father recited the poem to him as a child, that he himself memorized it, and that it inspired him as an adult. [21]
Several quotes from the poem were used in Buster Keaton's 1922 silent comedy The Blacksmith (1922).
In 1926, a comical song called "The Village Blacksmith Owns the Village Now" was published with words by Leslie Moore and music by Johnny Tucker. [22] The lyrics detailed how the blacksmith grew rich with the rise of the automobile by converting his shop into a service station. The song was recorded by popular U.S. comedians and bandleaders of the era including the Happiness Boys and Harry Reser.
In 1938, songwriters Tommie Connor, Jimmy Kennedy, and Hamilton Kennedy created a comical song and dance routine inspired by the poem; Glenn Miller's recording of the song was featured in the 1990 film Memphis Belle . [23]
Daffy Duck recites a portion of the poem in the 1953 cartoon Duck Amuck .
The first bandmaster of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, R. T. Stevens, suggested the adoption of the song version of "The Village Blacksmith" as the Corps' march of the RAOC in 1922. He argued that the melody had a marching lilt, the theme was appropriate, and that many regimental marches were based on airs. Accordingly "The Village Blacksmith" became the RAOC Regimental March. The Royal New Zealand Army Ordnance Corps adopted the same march. [24]
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator. His original works include the poems "Paul Revere's Ride", "The Song of Hiawatha", and "Evangeline". He was the first American to completely translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and was one of the fireside poets from New England.
Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie is an epic poem by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, written in English and published in 1847. The poem follows an Acadian girl named Evangeline and her search for her lost love Gabriel during the time of the Expulsion of the Acadians.
The Courtship of Miles Standish is an 1858 narrative poem by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about the early days of Plymouth Colony, the colonial settlement established in America by the Mayflower Pilgrims.
The Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site is a historic site located at 105 Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was the home of noted American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for almost 50 years, and it had previously served as the headquarters of General George Washington (1775–76).
"Excelsior" is a short poem written in 1841 by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The fireside poets – also known as the schoolroom or household poets – were a group of 19th-century American poets associated with New England. These poets were very popular among readers and critics both in the United States and overseas. Their domestic themes and messages of morality presented in conventional poetic forms deeply shaped their era until their decline in popularity at the beginning of the 20th century.
Tales of a Wayside Inn is a collection of poems by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The book, published in 1863, depicts a group of people at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, as each tells a story in the form of a poem. The characters telling the stories at the inn are based on real people. The compilation, which Longfellow originally wanted to title "The Sudbury Tales", proved to be popular and he issued two additional series in the 1870s.
Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow Jr. was an American architect and nephew of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
"I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" is a Christmas carol based on the 1863 poem "Christmas Bells" by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The song tells of the narrator hearing Christmas bells during the American Civil War, but despairing that "hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men". After much anguish and despondency the carol concludes with the bells ringing out with resolution that "God is not dead, nor doth He sleep" and that there will ultimately be "peace on earth, good will to men".
The Village Blacksmith is a 1922 American silent melodrama film directed by John Ford and produced and distributed by Fox Film Corporation. One of the eight reels survives at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and therefore the film is considered to be lost. It was loosely adapted from the poem of the same name by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
"The Children's Hour" is a poem by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, first published in the September 1860 edition of The Atlantic Monthly.
The Dexter Pratt House is an historic house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is remembered as the home of Dexter Pratt, the blacksmith who inspired the poem "The Village Blacksmith" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
"A Psalm of Life" is a poem written by American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, often subtitled "What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist". Longfellow wrote the poem not long after the death of his first wife and while thinking about how to make the best of life. It was first published anonymously in 1838 before being included in a collection of Longfellow's poems the next year. Its inspirational message has made it one of Longfellow's most famous poems.
"Paul Revere's Ride" is an 1860 poem by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that commemorates the actions of American patriot Paul Revere on April 18, 1775, although with significant inaccuracies. It was first published in the January 1861 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. It was later retitled "The Landlord's Tale" in Longfellow's 1863 collection Tales of a Wayside Inn.
Hyperion: A Romance is one of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's earliest works, published in 1839. It is a prose romance which was published alongside his first volume of poems, Voices of the Night.
Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called the "King's Highway" or "Tory Row" before the American Revolutionary War, is the site of many buildings of historical interest, including the modernist glass-and-concrete building that housed the Design Research store, and a Georgian mansion where George Washington and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow both lived, as well as John Vassall and his seven slaves including Darby Vassall. Samuel Atkins Eliot, writing in 1913 about the seven Colonial mansions of Brattle Street's "Tory Row," called the area "not only one of the most beautiful but also one of the most historic streets in America." "As a fashionable address it is doubtful if any other residential street in this country has enjoyed such long and uninterrupted prestige."
Richard Henry Dana III was an American lawyer and civil service reformer.
A Boy's Will is a poetry collection by Robert Frost, and is the poet's first commercially published book of poems. The book was first published in 1913 by David Nutt in London, with a dedication to Frost's wife, Elinor. Its first American edition came two years later, in 1915, through Henry Holt and Company.
Alice Mary Longfellow was a philanthropist, preservationist, and the eldest surviving daughter of the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She is best known as "grave Alice" from her father's poem "The Children's Hour".
"The Barefoot Boy" is a poem written by American Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. The poem was first published in The Little Pilgrim in January 1855.
