Summary
The young man, speaking from his "heart," refuses to accept that life is “an empty dream” or that the soul is dead.
Instead, he says that life is indeed real and true and that death is not the goal of life; the soul lives on and does not turn to dust. We are meant to act and go beyond mere sorrow or happiness.
Even though we are brave, though, we still move towards death. Thus, we must seize the life we have and be heroic, be more than dumb beasts. We ought to be wary of the past and the future, and instead live and act within the present.
When we look at the lives of great men we can see that it is possible to live with meaning and that when we depart, we leave our “footprints on the sands of time.” It is possible that some other person who is toiling mournfully may see our footprints and take heart. Knowing this, we should be hopeful, prepared for anything; we should endeavor to achieve and pursue, as well as “learn to labor and to wait.”
Analysis
This is one of Longfellow’s most beloved poems. It is didactic, intending to provide advice and counsel to young men earnestly endeavoring to discern how to live this ephemeral life. The poem concerns a young man who is responding to a psalmist after the older man gives an answer to the putative question of what the meaning of life is; we do not have the psalmist’s response but can guess that it consisted of Bible verses and a prosaic, Puritan-style claim that the sublunary life is meaningless and humans should focus on meeting their creator in the afterlife. The fact that the man is referred to as a “psalmist” gives the reader clues to what the poem is actually about. As critic Randall Huff describes it, the poem is “a youthful declaration of independence from a pessimistic determinism supported by the full weight of biblical authority.” The words “numbers” and “psalms” allude to the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, and provide the sense that the psalmist’s conception of life is one of bleakness, conservatism, and pessimism.
The young man’s response incorporates themes from Protestantism, but is much more optimistic. He uses religious language and thereby shows, as Huff writes, that “his plans are not empty dreams because, as the products of his soul, they offer proof that his soul is not dead.” Even though the body molders into dust, his soul does not.
The young man’s account of what life should entail is reflective of the Protestant work ethic in which earnest labor brings meaning to a difficult life. It also incorporates the influence of J. W. v. Goethe's romantic brand of German Protestantism, which lauded action and boldness. Action and striving are key in this poem, but Longfellow says it is also important to embrace quietness of spirit and the value that comes in waiting and contemplation. Waiting can be a sort of labor itself, and labor for its own sake does not bring satisfaction or meaning.
The poem, written in 1838, draws on Protestant, Romantic, and "common sense" aesthetic thought that circulated at the time. Critic Jill Anderson discusses these influences and how Longfellow uses them to give form to his didacticism. She writes, “the poem echoes other didactic texts of the era by urging that the heart and the mind be directed toward a number of goals—mature adulthood, moral integrity, economic success, salvation itself—without referring to any of these goals specifically.” A man works on himself the way a poet crafts a poem, a blacksmith shapes a sword, or an artist paints a canvas.
In terms of literary influences upon the text, scholars usually find the aforementioned Goethe as well as Poe and Dante, but this poem also has many similarities to a few Spanish works. Longfellow spent the years between 1826 and 1837 traveling Europe and did not write poems during this time; instead, he translated many works, those in the Spanish language outnumbering those in other languages. Sister M. Aquinas Healy addresses this in her article on the poem, noting that “Psalm of Life” was the first original poem written after Longfellow’s time of study and translation. In particular, she sees Jorge Manrique’s poem “Coplas” as an influence; this was not only because Longfellow called this poem the “most beautiful moral Poem” in the Spanish language, but because similarities exist in terms of the concept of the empty dream, the soul’s goal being something other than going to the grave, and the counsel given to the reader to focus on the present rather than the past or future.
