Fireside Poems

For Memorial Day, a poem by Longfellow honoring an unknown soldier who fell during the Peninsular Campaign of the Civil War.

Viola realizes that Olivia thinks she's a boy and loves her with an amorous love that can't be returned, just one third of a triangle of loves that can't be returned.

Longfellow retells the story of Pandora, making her a figure of sympathy and pathos while respecting the tragic vision of the Greeks.

A tribute by Longfellow to the English actress Fanny Kemble praising her performances of Shakespeare's plays, together with observations on Fanny Kemble's feminist and abolitionist activities and thus her importance not just in studies of literature and theater, but in race and gender studies as well.

A poem for Arbor Day by William Cullen Bryant, on the planting of a tree as a gift to the future. The spiritual benefit of trees.

For Earth Day, a poem that warns of the risk of environmental disaster brought on by the attempt to control nature. Longfellow anticipates Rachel Carson's Silent Spring 100 years before it was published.

For National Poetry Month, a poem about the power of poetry to gladden, to strengthen, and to sooth.

Longfellow compares an incident from medieval Spanish history with his feelings about the treason of the world's comfortable against the world's poor. He reminds his audience that Christ is the Lord of the poor, and that those who care not for the poor care not for Christ.

Longfellow celebrates the coming of spring and meditates on how it relates to the cycle of human life

A revery in Bruges, Belgium, in which the romance of Medieval Europe returns to the poet's imagination.