Life is real! Life is Earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returneth, Was not spoken of the soul.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A Psalm of Life
Topic: Life Beyond Death & the Spirit World
A PSALM OF LIFE
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 living 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.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline. He was also the first American to translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and was one of the five Fireside Poets from New England.
A Psalm of Life
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. “A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44644/a-psalm-of-life.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The most widely known and best-loved American poet of his lifetime, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow achieved a level of national and international prominence previously unequaled in the literary history of the United States. Poems such as “Paul Revere’s Ride,” Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847), and “A Psalm of Life” became mainstays of national culture, long remembered by generations of readers who studied them in school….
More important, Longfellow turned back to poetry after that second European journey and found encouragement in the warm reception of a group of poems he classified loosely as “psalms”…. Longfellow discovered an appreciative public response to the sad wisdom he had distilled from the disappointments of life; sadness empowered him to speak comforting, encouraging words to the many readers who responded gratefully to “A Psalm of Life,” “The Reaper and the Flowers,” “The Light of Stars,” “Footsteps of Angels,” and “Midnight Mass for the Dying Year.”
–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [A Psalm of Life: What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist].