Summary
It is evening, the dark descending like a feather falling from a soaring eagle. The speaker can see the village lights twinkling through the dark, rainy mist and he starts to feel an unmistakable sense of sadness, almost like actual pain.
He asks the person whom he is addressing to read him a simple poem to help calm him and erase the day. He is not interested in a grand, epic work because such poems suggest the trials and tribulations of life and he prefers something soothing.
He would prefer the work of a humble poet who speaks directly from the heart, whose words flow from the heart like tears flow from the eyes. When a poet like this faces toil he still finds a way to harness the melodies and music in his soul and pour them out into verse. These sorts of poems can alleviate care and bring about peace much like benediction after prayer.
Thus, he asks his companion to read a poem like this and add to its rhythm the beauty of her voice. This will fill the night with music and his cares will fade away much as the desert Arabs quietly pack up their tents and vanish.
Analysis
“The Day is Done,” published in 1844, is an evocative, melancholy poem. On first read it seems to be a somewhat simple work, but subsequent readings allow its deeper meanings to emerge. It is similar to works like “The Children’s Hour” in that it takes place within a domestic space and features a personal and intimate relationship between the speaker and, in this case, his female companion (in “The Children’s Hour” it is, of course, his children).
The imagery Longfellow uses is particularly redolent. First, he evokes darkness, weariness (the feather slowly wafting downward), and moodiness (the rain and mist). Second, his tone and his request to his companion to read him a simple poem perfectly conjure an image of the poet sinking into a chair before the hearth, his visage careworn, his beloved approaching him with a beatific smile and a cherished work of heartfelt poems. The final image is significant as well, for in his comparison of his own melancholy thoughts finally fleeing to Arabs folding their tents and “silently [stealing] away” he indicates how his mood is shifting back into contentment. Furthermore, the comparison of the nomadic Arabs with their collapsible domiciles to the cozy, permanent abode of the poet allows Longfellow to give voice to his recipe for happiness and restoration of the spirit: the home.
Critic Matthew Gartner notes this, saying “the image of the last stanza is one of restlessness and transience: without a permanent home, without a restorative setting in which to give in to exhaustion, the Arabs’ fatigue must be as unending as their wanderings. The easily folded and removed tents of the nomads are a foil for the absent construct at the center of ‘The Day is Done,’ the fixed and anchored American home.” Gartner also sees the poem as a rather curious one in Longfellow’s oeuvre for this very reason: as an intensely private poet whose works almost never dealt with his own sorrows and concerns, it “represents a breach of form: the author ought to be offering consolation, not asking for it.”
Longfellow’s cultivated persona as a fatherly figure seems to be challenged here, but ultimately it was these small lapses in the persona that made him all the more beloved. Gartner writes, “Longfellow’s lack of interest in calling attention to himself as an individual is balanced by his habitual tendency to resort to scenes, persons, and feelings from his own life; in consequence, Longfellow’s ‘self’ as found in the poems is at once close to the surface and remote.”
One of the main components of the poem is its commentary on poetry and its purposes. There are poems of a more heroic bent (for example, Paradise Lost, The Faerie Queen, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Iliad, etc.) that take for their subjects great men and great deeds, tragedy and toil, epic feats and the deepest sorrows. These poems should certainly be read, Longfellow says, but there are times when their tone and subject are not appropriate. When a person is melancholy and low what is most needed is actually a simple, heartfelt poem by a bard of more modest poetic proclivities; this poem can be therapeutic in the way a cup of tea or a sweet song or a child’s kiss is. There is value in simplicity, both in terms of the content and the style. In fact, this is why people like Longfellow himself so much; many of his poems are guileless, simple, and earnest.
