A word from Longfellow…

by Richard Subber | Sep 6, 2026 | Poetry, Reviews of other poets

Got “repining”?

I read lots of poetry—colonial, classic American, modern—and I don’t find much that I like.

This is puzzling to me. I think hard about what I like and dislike about poetry, especially my own poetry. I’m still not prepared to offer any explanation much beyond my sincere failure to discern anything meaningful in the kind of poetry I classify as “obscure,” you know, the wayward romp through disconnected words and disjoint images, and the wanton disregard of verb tense/pronoun antecedents/subject and verb relationships/sentence structure…I think you may have seen this kind of wantonly weird stuff:

“Sky falls cloud sheep bray at starry islands in my hoping

are them my lost love I step around the dog poo…”

I just rapped that out this minute. No poetic inspiration involved. It doesn’t make me proud. I’m trying to get to a point:

I’ve read a bit of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). Longfellow was a lyric poet who tried his hand at free verse, although much of his work is constrained to the often stultifying shackle of line after line and page after page of rhyme. Longfellow writes at length. I confess I can’t make myself keep turning the pages to read “Evangeline” and “The Song of Hiawatha.” I do understand that this fashion of poetry was written and enjoyed before the successive advents of radio, TV, Sony Walkman and the internet. I guess reading a poem for an hour or so was more doable in the 19th century.

Longfellow does offer something to me in his more bite-size poetry. He was a capable wordsmith and he dreamed out images and insights and perspectives that appeal to me, and even nudge me to wakefulness.

In “Snow-Flakes” he placidly describes a snowfall:

“Out of the bosom of the Air,

…The troubled sky reveals

The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air…”

In “The Rainy Day” he says something we all know:

“…Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;

Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;

Thy fate is the common fate of all,

Into each life some rain must fall,

Some days must be dark and dreary.”

Thus, in Longfellow, something of poetry.

Admit it, we don’t use “repining” often enough

in our casual conversations.

* * * * * *

Book review: A Cold Welcome

The culprit was global cooling,

500 years ago…

by Sam White

click here

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Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,

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