Nature

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1878

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Motherhood and Maternal Love

The poem centers on the figure of the “fond mother” (Line 1). For Gilded Age America, even as its culture was morphing into a new age fostered as much by the rise in science as industrialization, the home emerged as a stable measure of convention and the reassurance of tradition. Within the home, even as the culture was moving toward addressing the increasing demands for a more developed role for women, the figure of the mother symbolized calmness, continuity, sacrifice, love, and a reliable bond of trust motivated by compassion.

For Longfellow, then, the mother symbolized the ideal vehicle for delivering the harsh news of death’s reality. Gently but resolutely, the mother figure here escorts her reluctant child off to a well-deserved rest. During the time period of the poem, a father figure might be out of place in the ritual of bedtime; he was perceived as a sterner presence and guided by iron imperatives defined by the world outside the home. The mother, by contrast, within Gilded Age culture, spends the day with the child and understands how best to address the child’s perceptions of heading off to the uncertainty of bedtime. In this, the poem cushions the reality of death without negating it.

Playthings

The toys, “broken playthings” (Line 4), scattered about the floor symbolize all the elements of daily life that appear, as death approaches, as invaluable and coaxing. As the child heads to bed, he longs for these “broken” toys—well-worn but valuable treasures the child would just as soon not abandon. Toys, within the allegory that Longfellow argues, represent a wide range of things that distract, engage, entertain, and define the life-narratives of his readers: talents, looks, loves, work, family, possessions. The logic of the poem’s allegory reassures Longfellow’s readers that the “toys” of a life well-lived can be engaging, even addictive, but they are broken, used, familiar, and hence slowly losing their enchantment.

In the poem, the new toys—“others in their stead” (Line 7)—represent something beyond our capacity to define, something that will reduce these toys to ironic distraction. Longfellow does not pretend to extend the argument of his sonnet into the deep reach of theology. These “new toys” might be angels, joy, light, happiness, peace, and so on; the absence of specifics provides hope. In that promise, the child glimpses the optimism of the poem’s sobering close: Imagine how much grander, how transcendent, the elements of an afterlife will be. Thus, the poem uses toys two ways: as objects we know, ultimately disposable, and as ideals, things we cannot, in the end, begin to comprehend.

The Hand

The hand the mother extends to her child symbolizes death itself. Philosophers and poets since Antiquity have offered personifications of death, ranging from imaginative to terrifying. Here Longfellow reassures that death is best conceived as the offered hand of a loving mother determined, against our limited sense of the moment, to guide us to a well-earned night’s rest. “Day is o’er” (Line 1), the poet says, the logic of that fitting a poem designed not to terrify or depress but to provide hope. The extended hand symbolizes the logic then of following, not leading, the quiet movement to death. Death here is symbolized by the bed, a comforting space apart from the day’s busyness, both familiar and strange, both alluring and unsettling. The symbol of the mother’s hand suggests a smooth and dignified concession, not a surrender, not a sign of weakness or loss of will but rather just the opposite; it is a sign of the decision, yes, the day was fun, but what unimaginable splendors tomorrow might bring. The hand then symbolizes the necessary trust each person places that “night” is not some absolute that must be resisted (how easy it would have been for Longfellow to make the child belligerent). The hand relieves death of its apparent suddenness. Death does not come for us, trap us, pull us into its darkness; rather we head into its mystery, emboldened with a child’s curiosity and faith, in the enchantment of possibility and the transcendent unknown.