Analysis of The Jewish Cemetery at Newport
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 (Portland) – 1882 (Cambridge)
How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!
The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep
Wave their broad curtains in the southwind's breath,
While underneath these leafy tents they keep
The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.
And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,
That pave with level flags their burial-place,
Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down
And broken by Moses at the mountain's base.
The very names recorded here are strange,
Of foreign accent, and of different climes;
Alvares and Rivera interchange
With Abraham and Jacob of old times.
"Blessed be God! for he created Death!"
The mourner said, "and Death is rest and peace!"
Then added, in the certainty of faith,
"And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease."
Closed are the portals of their Synagogue,
No Psalms of David now the silence break,
No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue
In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.
Gone are the living, but the dead remain,
And not neglected; for a hand unseen,
Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,
Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.
How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,
What persecution, merciless and blind,
Drove o'er the sea -that desert desolate -
These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?
They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,
Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire;
Taught in the school of patience to endure
The life of anguish and the death of fire.
All their lives long, with the unleavened bread
And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,
The wasting famine of the heart they fed,
And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears.
Anathema maranatha! was the cry
That rang from town to town, from street to street:
At every gate the accursed Mordecai
Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.
Pride and humiliation hand in hand
Walked with them through the world where'er they went;
Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,
And yet unshaken as the continent.
For in the background figures vague and vast
Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime,
And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.
And thus forever with reverted look
The mystic volume of the world they read,
Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,
Till life became a Legend of the Dead.
But ah! what once has been shall be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again.
Scheme | ABAB CDCD BEBE FGFG DHXH IJIJ KLKL XMXM NXNX OXOX PQPQ RXRX STST UOUO VKVX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | Quatrain (73%) Tetractys (20%) Etheree (20%) |
Metre | 111111011 110111111 1001010101 1101110101 01111111011 111100011 101110111 01010010011 01111101 11110111001 1101010111 01011010101 0101010111 11001011001 010001001 110010111 111110101 0101011101 1100010011 010111011 110101110 1111010101 1110101 001100101 1101010101 0101010101 10011010101 1111010101 1111111101 101010001 11001110100 1101111 1101010101 10010101 1001110101 01110001110 11111011 010111011 0101010111 011111111 01001101 1111111111 110010110 1101011101 100010101 1111011011 1001001101 0101010100 100110101 1100110101 0101010101 1101000101 0101010101 0101010111 1011010101 1101010101 1111111111 0101001001 1111011101 0011010101 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 2,536 |
Words | 457 |
Sentences | 24 |
Stanzas | 15 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 |
Lines Amount | 60 |
Letters per line (avg) | 34 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 137 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 30 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 2:17 min read
- 109 Views
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"The Jewish Cemetery at Newport" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 19 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/18881/the-jewish-cemetery-at-newport>.
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