This Is A Lesson I Hope To Pass Down
This originally ran in The Free Press.
Poems have always been earnest. That’s why some of them are so cringe.
Rhapsodizing about nature. Pouring out your heart to a lover. Finding deep meaning in small things. Brooding on mortality.
But a few years ago, I was talking to Allie Esiri for the Daily Stoic podcast about her wonderful book A Poem For Every Night of the Year, which I have been reading to my sons since they were little. I mentioned that I was struck by the earnest desire for self-help and self-mastery in many of the 19th-century poems written by male authors.
You might be familiar with some of them.
Kipling’s If— is obviously a classic of this genre. So is Henley’s Invictus. Adam Lindsay Gordon’s Ye Weary Wayfarer is another one of my favorites.
“Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in your own.”
It must be acknowledged that many of the most famous of these poems were products of the British Empire at the height of its imperial power. While I’m pleased that we no longer publish poems calling a generation to pick up ‘the White Man’s burden’ or celebrating the suicidal (and avoidable) charge of the Light Brigade, I would like to point out that there was once a time, not that long ago, when an average person would pick up their daily newspaper and find a totally straightforward, understandable poem full of advice on how to be a good person or navigate the difficulties of life.
Perhaps because it doesn’t have any jingoism or machismo—just the source code for existence—one of my favorites of this genre has always been one that is uniquely American: Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life.
It opens quite powerfully,
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!—
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
I was a kid in the 90s. I was in high school in the early 2000s. I started my career in the citadel of hipsterdom, American Apparel. Everything was couched in irony. There was a self-consciousness, an almost incapacity to be serious. The drugs and the partying and the sex were, I suspect, hallmarks of a culture distracting itself with pleasure so it would not have to look inward and come up empty.
Is that really what we’re here for, Longfellow asks? No, he says, we’re here to work on ourselves and to get better, to make progress—for tomorrow to find us a little bit further along than we are today.
Do things! Make things! Try your best! You matter! That’s what Longfellow is saying.
A 13-year-old Richard Milhous Nixon was given a copy of A Psalm of Life, which he promptly hung up on his wall, memorized, and later presented at school. Perhaps it’s because of people like Nixon—or Napoleon or Hitler—that we shy away from talking about individuals changing the world these days. The ‘Great Man of History Theory’ is problematic. It’s dangerous. It’s exclusionary. The problem is that in tossing it, we lose the opportunity to inspire children that they can change the world for the better, too.
Many of Longfellow’s poems do precisely this: There’s one about Florence Nightingale, an angel who reinvents nursing. There’s another about Paul Revere and his midnight ride to warn revolutionary Patriots of approaching British troops. He celebrates Native American heroes in “The Song of Hiawatha.” They are not always the most historically accurate accounts, but to borrow a metaphor from Maggie Smith’s poem, “Good Bones”—which, again, some pretentious folks might find cringe—when we read poems to our children, we are trying to “sell them the world.” Will we sell them a horrible one? Or we will sell them on all the potential, the idea that they could “make this place beautiful”?
One of the reasons I find so many modern novels boring and end up quitting most prestige television is that everybody sucks. Nobody is trying to be good. Nothing they do matters. I’ve even found that many children’s books fall into the same trap. They are either about nonsense (pizza, funny dragons, etc) or they are insufferably woke (pandering to parents instead of children). Academia has been consumed by the idea that everything is structural and intersectional and essentially impossible to change. History was made by hypocrites and racists and everything is rendered meaningless by the original sins and outright villainy of our ancestors.
To be up and doing, as Longfellow advises, laboring and waiting, they would claim, is therefore naive. His privilege is showing when he tells us to live in the present and have a heart for any fate. One Longfellow critic has referred to the poem’s “resounding exhortation” as “Victorian cheeriness at its worst.”
But what’s the alternative? Because it’s starting to feel a lot like nihilism. I’m not sure that’s the prescription for what ails young men these days. In fact, isn’t that the cause of the disease?
I draw on one of the lines from A Psalm of Life in my book Perennial Seller, about making work that lasts: “Art is long, and Time is fleeting.” There’s a famous Latin version of this expression: Ars longa, vita brevis.
I find it depressing how ephemeral and transactional most of my peers are. They chase trends and fads. They care about the algorithm and the whims of the moment—not about making stuff that matters and endures. Longfellow urges us to resist the pull of what’s hot right now—to think bigger and more long-term, to fight harder:
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
That stanza is an epigraph in another one of my books, Courage is Calling. I return to it throughout the book because that’s what these things—earnestness, sincerity, the audacity to try, to aim high, to do our best—require: courage. It takes courage to care. Only the brave believe, especially when everyone else is full of doubt and indifference. As you strive to be earnest and sincere, people will laugh at you. They will try to convince you that this doesn’t matter, that it won’t make a difference. Losers have always gotten together in little groups and talked about winners. The hopeless have always mocked the hopeful.
It’s been said by many biographers—often with a sneer—that the key to understanding Theodore Roosevelt (who would have certainly seen Longfellow strolling through Cambridge while he was an undergrad at Harvard) is realizing that he grew up reading about the great figures of history and decided to be just like them. Roosevelt actually believed. In himself. In stories. In something larger than himself. It is precisely this idea that Longfellow concludes Psalm with:
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
But this is not mere hero worship, because Longfellow qualifies it immediately with a much more reasonable, much more personal goal, explaining that these are,
“Footprints that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
Indeed, Longfellow would hear, not long after the poem’s publication, of a soldier dying in Crimea, heard repeating to himself with his final words, “footprints on the sands of time, footprints on the sands of time, footprints on the sands of time…”
A Psalm of Life is a call to meaning. A call to action. A call to be good. A call to make things that matter. A call to try to make a difference—for yourself and others. A reassurance that we matter. That although we return to dust, our soul lives on.
That’s why I read it to my sons. That’s the lesson that I want to pass along, a footprint I am trying to leave behind for them now, so that they might draw on it in some moment of struggle far in the future. So that they can always remember why we are here:
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
One foot in front of the other. One small act after one small action. One little thing that makes a difference, for us and for others.
