Bold. Tasteful. Nourishing.

The city in which Longfellow lived –– Boston, MA

Written by Sean Maynor.

Valuable literature, I mean good, full literature that is brimming over with didactic value requires skill to maintain its spark of interest. Authors make sure their message is fully supported and presented in their composition, but often fall short, burying it in an enigma of words. 

It is similar to finding a good cup of coffee: out in this day and age, all coffee that is sold prepared is usually not spot-on and fully satisfying; the perfect, homely cup of coffee is found once every three cups, it seems.

The coffee industry needs a man like Longfellow. 

Longfellow is often denigrated for his simplicity, when it is truly profound. Throughout Longfellow’s most circulated pieces are multiple practical and efficient rhetorical strategies that serve to keep his philosophical and didactic writing exoteric. 

Longfellow understood what many baristas do not: avoid unnecessary complication. 

Take “A Psalm of Life:” arguably one of the most popular poems, it has a simple message––working for the future “with a heart of any fate”––that Longfellow says plainly but argues forcefully. He uses anaphora in lines like “Life is real! Life is earnest!” to strengthen the authority of his argument. Longfellow is also using parallelism through the matching syntax and word forms of each sentence.  

This combination of anaphora and parallelism is seen in “The Day is Done” when he is delivering the final lines of his piece: “And the night shall be filled with music, / And the cares, that infest the day.” 

Longfellow was authoritative and powerfully argumentative while remaining elementary.

Such finesse is absent in most authors of the modern era.

Using imagery in writing is similar to coffee prepared with freshly ground beans; it is wise and beneficial. 

The key is causing the intended response or feeling, rather than explaining and describing it. 

In “The Sound of the Sea,” Longfellow anchors his message in imagery. He speaks of the “voice out of the silence of the deep.” With phrases like “...As of a cataract from the mountain’s side, / Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep,” you, the reader, watch the foamy waves crash down the rocky sea wall; you feel the salty wind brush against your cheeks––you are experiencing more than what your eyes can read. 

From words to pictures, the mind seamlessly imagines exactly what Longfellow intended. No complication; just the roar of the waves on the rocks. 

There is not one particular quality of coffee that determines its perfection; nor is there with literature. The smell, the consistency, the taste, the strength, the aftertaste; all are crucial elements to a sating cup of coffee. 

Longfellow uses his short list of rhetorical devices to create a similar homogenous solution with his poetry. He does not rely on a single rhetorical strategy to argue his point, nor to entice his reader’s emotional response. As a result, Longfellow communicates visually. He communicates emotionally. He communicates forcefully. 

The voice with which Longfellow writes lends a great example of his ability to be emotional and thus, an effective communicator. Listen to the emotion of “The Rainy Day.” Longfellow shifts his voice three times, once for each stanza. He speaks generally, and in a third person voice in stanza one with “The day is cold, and dark and dreary.” In stanza two, he heightens the emotional potency and shifts the voice to “My life is cold, and dark, and dreary.” In the final stanza, Longfellow concludes his poem by shifting to a fatherly, wise tone and speaks his message: “Be still, sad heart, and cease repining.” 

The shifts result in the reader initially seeing and understanding the issue at hand, then relating to the issue, and finally, responding to the issue as if it is in the reader’s own life. Writing that is persuasive, but still simple and enjoyable, is ideal writing––Longfellow writing. 

Applying a similar rhetorical technique In “The Builders,” he deploys a change in voice to shift from describing how “All are architects of Fate,” to mentoring the reader with “Let us do our work as well, / Both the unseen and the seen.” 

Longfellow is simple; he is potent. 

He has mastered the art of being very clear, but also very strong. Within “Mezzo Cammin” Longfellow tears down possible causes of what could have kept him “...from what I may accomplish yet;” He uses asyndeton when he removes “and” from the line “Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret...” giving the writing a sense of cyclical battering. Again, in “The Day is Done” he writes “Not from the grand old masters, / Not from the bards sublime,” using asyndeton to reject two ideas opposing his intended idea. 

The reader quickly processes through each line––through each reason––and is stuck agreeing with what is said because of the rhetorical and inert power of Longfellow’s words. 

In brewing coffee, a single detail like the quality of the water can affect the resulting brew; hard water makes gritty, bitter coffee. 

In writing poetry, the application of a small word makes a sizable difference when it comes to rhetorical strength. 

Longfellow’s “The Rainy Day” utilizes the power and drama of polysyndeton––repeating the “and.” The extra conjunctions cause the reader to feel a drawn-out, gloomy reaction to phrases like “My life is cold, and dark, and dreary; / It rains, and the wind is never weary.” 

Longfellow expresses the gloom of his message by drawing the reader into experiencing his intended feeling, rather than showing it.

Poetry––coffee, too––should avoid over-complication.

Longfellow, one of the greatest poets, taught many highly educational lessons; lessons that were commonly accessible; lessons that were rhetorically eloquent. Longfellow was able to say more with less, show rather than tell, and delight rather than bore. He systematically outshines many of the strongly held poets of his era in both readership and content.

His words are potent and unarguable but simple and straightforward, all because of his use of rhetorical devices. 

Today’s poetry would be better off if writers understood how effective Longfellow’s methods are. If coffee could be consistently satisfying and hearty like his poetry is, then the coffee industry, too, would be better off.