Longfellow first published his poem “A Psalm of Life” in 1836 in the literary

magazine The Knickerbocker. As one might intuit from the name of the publication,
that magazine was New York-based and Yankee-centric. A much wider readership was
reached two years later when the poem was included in the very first major
published collection of Longfellow’s poetry, Voices in the Night.
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The Second Great Awakening was only just beginning to crawl to an end and so the
heavily religious content found a naturally receptive audience across the country.
Even those not undergoing any particular spiritual awakening could find inspiration
in the message that glorified the positive aspects religious faith in the hereafter
while rejecting the depressive lamentations of a more apocalyptic interpretation of
Biblical faith.
The Young Man is the speaker of the poem, who is attacking the Psalmist for writing
sad poetry that transmits the message to readers that life is merely a phantasm and
illusory lie. The Young Man turns to Biblical scripture about Adam returning to
dust to prove his contention that the soul is immortal and therefore life is
anything but meaningless. “Tell me not, in mournful numbers Life is but an empty
dream!” are the opening lines of the poem and the set the stage for the thematic
thrust of the narrative: the Young Man challenges the very foundational basis of
the Psalmist’s body of work. The poetry written by the Psalmist is downbeat,
depressing, morbid and dangerous. Dangerous because it instils within the reader
the belief that life is meaningless; nothing but a dream devoid of significance or
point.
The Psalmist is the only other character in play, but his specific identity is
never made clear. Some have suggested that the Psalmist may actually be Longfellow
himself; a symbolic representative of himself during his more depressed and morbid
periods of existence. Another theory is that the Psalmist is a more universal
figure expressing the morbid verse of more contemporary figures like Poe or Lord
Byron in which case the lines “leave behind us/Footprints in the stand” becomes the
central metaphor of the poem as it urges readers to overcome grief and create
meaning for their lives by working hard toward individual accomplishments that will
in turn inspire others who follow behind them.
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The Young Man’s rage against the Psalmist is not really directed against any
specific writer, including the actual author of the Bible’s psalms so much as it is
directed against those who have taken the writer of those psalms at his word that
life is nothing but a meaningless dream. The real target of the poem are the
emotional zombies sleepwalking throughout life who choose to let life happen to
them instead of choosing to take the action necessary to become the heroes of their
own narrative.
In challenging the assumptions outlined by the Psalmist that life is nothing other
than an unfulfilled dream of an entity with a dead soul, Longfellow is pushing hard
against those who blindly accept that life is a pointlessly inexorable drive toward
the worms of the grave. The poem really does rail against spiritual zombies by
strongly suggesting that the key to finding meaning in life is—in an almost Zen-
like observation—to respond to the reality of each moment as an individual and not
as some passive lemming. By working hard to become the hero of the narrative, one
can achieve personal greatness that has the power to inspire. Thus, one leaves
behind the zombie horde and achieves immortality that utterly contradicts the
philosophical view of the Psalmist that existence is empty and every act
inconsequential.
While published in 1838, it is quite likely that composition had begun as early as
the fall of 1835 when his wife was in the throes of an illness to which she would
eventually succumb in November of that year. Longfellow admitted that he had kept
the poem hidden from other eyes well before finally submitting it for publication.
The dichotomy between darkness and light relative to having faith in God is one
that could very easily be read as a poet overcoming the dark abyss into which one
falls in the wake of losing a loved one. Underlying the overarching theme of raging
against spiritual zombie-ism is a directive on how to overcome profound grief.
Longfellow knows of what he speaks: the poet was stimulated to write this verse by
the premature and tragic death of his 22 year old wife, but would not consider it
fit for publication for another three years. It is relatively safe to assume that
in the interim, he spent considerable time poring of its message as well as
revising its structure and language. The key to overcoming such heartrending sorrow
that accompanies losing someone much loved—according to the poem—is to
enthusiastically embrace life and direct one’s energy toward staking out a heroic
claim upon their own little corner of the world. The cure to grief is productivity
as expressed in the poem’s concluding lines:
“Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing.
Learn to labor and to wait.”
The concluding lines of the poem serve to exhort the reader to take everything that
the speaker has encouraged them to do throughout the poem and live it on daily
basis. To make life mean something means to face up to everything that life has to
throw at you as if you were a hero facing both good and bad and everything in
between. Since you are a hero, pursue good, work hard and wait. The waiting is not
just the hardest part…is the ambiguous advice that likely is intended to mean
different things to different people. As popular as the poem was when first
published, it would later be yet another bit of verse from Longfellow to take on
the hard knocks offered by the more experimental and less sentimental mood of the
Modernists. Despite that dip in popularity, “A Psalm of Life” remains even today
one of the more beloved of Longfellow’s vast and impressive creative output thanks
largely to the universality and continued releveance of its message that the point
of life is not mere existence or even contemplation, but action. Action precedes
essence in the speaker’s philosophy, not existence.