Readings

by Rick Dietrich

The South Adopts Longfellow and
Longfellow Imagines the South

So, it turns out, Longfellow didn’t own a summer place on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, that he was never in Mississippi, or even on the Mississippi. A typical New Englander, he traveled extensively in Europe — France, Spain, Italy, Scandinavia; he went to Germany for his health — but doesn’t seem to have gone farther south than New York City. This doesn’t mean he didn’t write about the South, perhaps most famously in Evangeline; it only means that he didn’t know what he was writing about. Or, that he knew it only from books — from books and exhibitions. By a stroke of luck, a diorama of Mississippi arrived in Boston not long after Longfellow began his poem. Longfellow visited the huge painting and was taken by it; and the scenes along the river are some of the best realized in the poem.

Evangeline begins in Nova Scotia, another place Longfellow apparently never visited, though he grew up and went to college in Maine. And his Acadia, the French name for the region, looks more like central Sweden than eastern Canada. But the poem only begins there, for it is about dislocation as much as it is about love, though it is about love as well — and patience. Early in the so-called French and Indian wars, the English decided for strategic reasons to disperse Nova Scotia’s French-speaking settlers, whose loyalty they distrusted. These “Acadians” were scattered all along the Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, as far south as “Cajun” Louisiana. In Longfellow’s poem, this forced evacuation separates his heroine not only from her homeland but from her hero, just as they are to be married. And the beautiful Evangeline spends most of the rest of the poem, hexameter after hammered hexameter, searching for Gabriel. (Longfellow chose to write Evangeline in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Greek epic. It doesn’t always work, however, for Evangeline isn’t really an epic but a long sentimental story.)

Evangeline is beautiful. Here is Longfellow’s first description of her:

Fair was she to behold, that
maiden of seventeen summers.
Black were her eyes as the berry
that grows on the thorn by the wayside,
Black, yet how softly they
gleamed beneath the brown shade of her tresses!
Sweet was her breath as the breath
of kine that feed in the meadows.

Evangeline is beautiful, even if she smells like a cow. But more than beautiful, she is patient, “a maiden who waited and wandered, / Lowly and meek in spirit, and patiently suffering all things.” Hers is not a suffering patience, though, if that suggests a passive patience. Her waiting is wandering. She pursues her Gabriel down the Mississippi to Louisiana, where they nearly connect, then west and west into the Ozarks.

Only years later, does she leave off pursuit to take on the habit of a Sister of Mercy, nursing in hospitals. It is in this garb that she finally meets Gabriel, at his deathbed. Though he cannot speak, he seems to recognize her. (I’ll avoid suggesting that it may be by her bovine breath.)

Vainly he strove to rise; and
Evangeline, kneeling beside him,
Kissed his dying lips, and laid his head on her bosom.
Sweet was the light of his eyes;
but it suddenly sank into darkness,
As when a lamp is blown out by a
gust of wind at a casement.
All was ended now, the hope, and
the fear, and the sorrow,
All the aching of heart, the
restless, unsatisfied longing,
All the dull, deep pain, and
constant anguish of patience!
And, as she pressed once more the
lifeless head to her bosom,
Meekly she bowed her own, and
murmured, “Father, I thank thee!”

I wouldn’t have written of Longfellow this issue, if we hadn’t discovered this — it turns out bogus — Pascagoula connection. In fact, when the idea was presented to me, I looked over my shoulder, worrying that Georgia State University might come and take away my English degree, so little did I know about him. (What I know now comes from hastily read books and glanced at exhibitions.) But I thought of Evangeline, because of its theme of exile and its connection to Louisiana, and I am glad to have revisited it, though for neither of those reasons.

In his 2004 biography of Longfellow, Charles Calhoun also notes how energetic Evangeline’s patience is. In a nineteenth-century world that celebrated “male achievement, male heroism, male ingenuity,” Longfellow created a female character “of considerable agency, a woman who survives by her wits,” as well as her persistence, “over a sprawling, untamed American wilderness that crippled or destroyed many of the men who ventured there.”

The world has changed since Longfellow finished Evangeline in February of 1847. Louisiana has changed since August. I have no idea what that means, but I am almost certain that to come through, it won’t take so much achievement, heroism and “male ingenuity” as it will take wit and persistence, the virtue of active patience and the patient faith that can thank God for the smallest of favors.