Evangeline: A Poem in Exile
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Proceedings of The National Conference
On Undergraduate Research (NCUR) 2007
Dominican University of California
San Rafael, California
April 12 – 14, 2007
Evangeline: A Poem in Exile
Lynn Ramsey
College of Arts and Sciences: English
University of South Florida: Sarasota-Manatee
8350 N. Tamiami Trail
Sarasota, Florida 34243-2049 USA
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Suzanne Stein
Abstract
This essay explores the narrative poem of nineteenth century American poet Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline. It encourages a fresh look at a forgotten story and
author, with attention to the historicity and importance of Evangeline as an iconic symbol
in North American history and literature. Longfellow’s Evangeline sparked an “Acadian
renaissance” that put a face on the plight of an almost extinct people. This once beloved
poem, Evangeline, has fallen from favor in recent decades. This paper examines the role
the poem played in the history of the Americas and the Acadians, and its mythic status
and influence, looking also at the contemporary regard of Longfellow as a poet, from
Baudelaire to Hawthorne, the reception of this poem, and its legacy to history.
Evangeline deserves a greater appreciation for this as well as for its stylistic and thematic
aspects. The analysis of the poem explores its themes of exile, displacement, loss, and
Bildungsroman; its form and language are examined to discover a poem and a people
“full of pathos,” illustrating that it is not merely a sentimental period piece. The research
for this paper includes contemporary and modern criticism, as well as archival source
material.
Keywords: Evangeline, Exile, Proceedings2
I stay a little longer, as one stays, to cover up the embers that still burn.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
This essay explores Longfellow’s narrative poem, Evangeline and its legacy to
American culture. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the leading poet of the nineteenth
century, is not read much these days. Tastes and memories are fickle things, as is literary
criticism. How is it that the first American poet, the “bard of the American masses,” has
slipped into relative literary obscurity? Or has he? His legacy has permeated our language
with idioms, allusions, and sayings whose dusty provenance is unknown to the average
user. The mellifluous simplicity of Longfellow’s poetry renders some lines persistently
memorable: “Into each life, a little rain must fall...ships that pass in the night...wreck of
the Hesperus...Under the spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands...Listen, my
children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,” and “Of peace on earth,
good-will to men!”
His poetry influenced the works of numerous nineteenth century authors, from
Henry James to Robert Frost.1 Longfellow’s body of work was a “public poetry,”
belonging to the masses, to everyman. This was a genre which Whitman had hoped to
claim; it embodied the spirit of a nascent nation and imbued it with a misty history and
folklore like the European countries from which she was built.2
Longfellow was not without his contemporary critics: Margaret Fuller deemed his
work as “artificial and imitative,” yet not mechanical.3 One of his harshest critics was
Poe. Ironically, Longfellow had the admiration of the French poet, Charles Baudelaire;
Baudelaire translated Poe’s works into French, making him hugely popular there, yet he
pays Longfellow the highest compliment by borrowing lines from his Psalm of Life:43
L’art est long et le Temps est court….. Art is long, and Time is fleeting….
Mon Coeur, comme un tambour voile And our hearts, like muffled drums
Va battant des marches funèbres. Are beating funeral marches to the grave.
Charles Baudelaire, Le Guignon Longfellow, Psalm of Life
Hawthorne’s review of Longfellow’s magnum opus is beautiful prose in itself. He
describes the odyssey of Evangeline as one of “pathos all illuminated with beauty.” He
praises Longfellow’s imagery: “beautiful thoughts spring up like roses, and gush forth
like violets along a wood-path,” and admires his musicality “whether it imitate a forest-
wind or the violin of an Acadian fiddler.”5
Longfellow’s popularity was such that by his seventieth birthday in 1877, national
parades with marching children were held to celebrate America’s bard.6 A fireside copy
of Evangeline became a fixture in many American households. He garnered international
respect as well, and is the only American poet commemorated with a bust in Britain’s
renowned Poet’s Corner.7
Longfellow created a national myth and folklore, where there had previously been
no expression. His poetry filled a void for a young country in the throes of
industrialization and urbanization. The 1840’s, when Evangeline was published, was
America’s greatest decade with regard to westward and southward expansion, bursting at
the seams to discover herself. Longfellow gave a voice to the Indian with The Song of
Hiawatha and a song to the slave in poems such as The Slave Singing at Midnight;
Longfellow immortalized historical events such as The Courtship of Miles Standish and
Evangeline. It could be said of Evangeline that she was sort of national symbol of the
displacement of the family, challenging Longfellow’s perceptions of hearth and home.
This “brooding pathos,” becomes a relentless motif in this poem and others.84
It is well documented that Hawthorne had originally been given the details about
the legend of Evangeline and the Acadians by a friend who thought that the themes of
repressed passions and a displaced people would appeal to Hawthorne’s pen. Hawthorne
did nothing with the idea for some years, and when Longfellow heard the legend
recounted at Hawthorne’s home one evening, Longfellow requested permission to try his
hand at making something of it. Published in 1847, Longfellow took over a year to write
his “Acadian idyl,” Evangeline; it was an instant hit, and Longfellow’s greatest success,
with six printings in only nine weeks.9
The story of star-crossed young lovers, separated all their lives only to find each
other shortly before death, like an Acadian Romeo and Juliet, had a universal appeal. It
has been considered the first American epic, written almost a hundred years after the
facts of the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia beginning in 1755.10
The poignant story of the Acadian diaspora from Nova Scotia to the American
colonies as told by Longfellow in Evangeline is hauntingly compelling. The contrast
between the tranquility of the virtuous Acadians and the violence of the British bullies
resonated with the poem’s audience. Longfellow sublimated the violence of the events to
the pathos of the defenseless victims. He did not use it as a forum to right a wrong in
history, although that was the unintended outcome after its publication. It generated
interest in a virtually forgotten people in an obscure moment in history, subsequently
creating an Acadian renaissance.11
Evangeline was so popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the
poem was translated into many languages, with twelve different versions in Spanish
alone. Its theme of exile was particularly resonant with a Mexican nation on the verge of5
war.12 The poem’s influence was such that a grammar text written for school children
was built entirely on the poem at the turn of the twentieth century; in the preface to the
text, the author summarizes the book’s lofty goal, echoing Longfellow’s own mantra: “to
impart to the student knowledge of his mother-tongue in a pleasing way…. in the hopes
of beguiling the child into a love of good literature and a respect for pure English…. and
to aid the development of a sound literary taste.”13
The history of the Acadians in North America is necessarily sketchy due to the
nature of exile and expatriation. Without a home, it is difficult to maintain a cohesive
record of the history of a people in exile. The Acadians were predominately farmers, and
saw no need for formal education. Hence, they only had an oral history. During the first
half of the eighteenth century, possession of the territory was contested and governed in
turn between the French and the British. By mid-century, the British had taken control of
the colony. Fearing that the allegiance of the French-descended Acadians would naturally
lean to their adversary, the Acadians were expelled from their beautiful land, which had
been home for a century and a half. Numbers are sketchy at best, but it is estimated that
some 14,000, or over three-fourths of the Acadian population were displaced between
1755 and 1763, and almost half of these died from disease and poverty.14
It is not difficult to imagine the reception that these humble refugees received in
their quest to start their lives anew in a strange land, with a strange language. Only
Connecticut had made arrangements with Nova Scotia to accept any of the deportees; the
other colonies claimed not to have been apprised of the situation.15 The story of the
proclamation to the Acadians is well-documented; the order, which was decided upon
without consulting the home government, was read, giving the inhabitants a few days to6
close up their affairs and prepare for departure.16 The ill-planned order was fraught with
tension and pathos. The men were ordered to report to the church at Grand-Pré and were
locked in for three days. Several were killed in the confusion. Women and children were
wrenched from one another’s arms and ordered to board separate ships, conjuring a scene
similar to the slave auction scene in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Their homes and farms
were burned in case there were any inhabitants left and to insure that they could not
return; livestock was left to starve to death. The dykes which they had built to protect
their farms from the Bay of Fundy were left to the neglect of time, completing the work
the British had begun.17 The Acadians were simply erased.
When the boats were loaded, families were separated, many never to be reunited.
Longfellow does not romanticize this heartbreaking scene:
There disorder prevailed, and the tumult and stir of embarking.
Busily plied the freighted boats; and in the confusion
Wives were torn from their husbands, and mothers,
too late, saw their children
Left on the land, extending their arms, with wildest entreaties.18
Evangeline’s father dies of grief on the shore while awaiting their turn to be herded on
the boats. His passing closes the book on the old ways, the Acadian traditions and ways
of life; a new chapter opens, the story of a forced exodus.
The ships were sent to various destinations in order to preclude an organized
Acadian return.19 Some ports, such as Virginia, refused entry to the refugees. Many died
in exile. Some Acadians settled in New England; some migrated back to the continent,
and a few managed to return to Nova Scotia years later, but many wandered in search of a
home, some for up to decades, before coming to rest in a southern promised land,
Louisiana. The name, “Cajun,” today is a derived from, “Acadian.”7
History is sometimes written to the advantage of the victors and contemporary
history books viewed the Acadians as responsible for their fate; the memory of the
Acadian people would have been misconstrued in history had Longfellow not published
Evangeline. He illuminated a darkened corner of North America’s past, and inadvertently
helped to right a terrible wrong.
The form of this narrative poem is dactylic hexameter, unusual for modern prose;
it easily lends itself to the air of melancholy characterizing the majority of the poem.20 It
was considered risky for Longfellow to have chosen to use this classical form, even in his
day. Hawthorne lyrically defended this form chosen by Longfellow as “an experiment”
in which the hexameter offered a “rhythmic plasticity,” that once read, the poem cannot
be conceived “as existing in any other measure.”21 The practice of containing melancholy
within “formal limits” was characteristic of the Victorian period, and was employed by
others such as Tennyson, Bryant and Frost.22
Use of the classical meter does underscore the timelessness of this “forest
primeval.” It captures an antique atmosphere, full of sonority and imagery, which
conveys a soothing lyric cadence. The use of the hexameter regulates the verse as it
struggles with its melancholic subject, providing harmony, despite the horror of the story:
“There disorder prevailed, and the tumult and stir of embarking.”23
Evangeline’s plot is a Bildungsroman, employing the familiar theme of the
orphaned girl, cast from her childhood home and alienated from family in order to
experience the growth of virtue. Evangeline has been immortalized in Longfellow’s poem
as the representation of exile, tender love, and quiet patience. Longfellow’s combination
of visual and auditory metaphors makes the story hauntingly atmospheric: “the bell from8
its turret sprinkled with holy sounds the air….starry silence,” and “pale blue smoke, like
clouds of incense ascending” create a misty ambiance.24 Of Gabriel’s father, upon
hearing the news of the impending calamity, he writes, “All his thoughts were congealed
into lines on his face, as the vapors freeze in fantastic shapes on the window-panes in the
winter.”25
The elegiac text foreshadows the coming exile of the Acadians. The bucolic
setting reinforces the pathos of Evangeline and the plight of her people; they are
memorialized in the “murmuring pines and the hemlocks,” as if they had never been
there. So begins the tale of Evangeline:
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Much of the action in the poem takes place at night or “twilight,” immersing the
reader in what Arvin refers to as the poem’s “dreamy nostalgia.” This opening stanza
closes with the following lines, and the refrain is repeated at the very end of the poem:
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
The second stanza of the narrative echoes the opening phrase and is worth
repeating:
This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland
the voice of the huntsman?
Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of the Acadian farmers,--
Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands,
Darkened by the shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven?
Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed!
Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October. 269
The once-famous opening lines pull aside a great sentimental curtain to a scene of
a world apart, a world where once a simple people dwelt as one with nature and heaven.
They are “hearts,” not simply an annihilated culture. The startled deer hears the voice: his
head pops up, his ears dart erect, his nostrils test the air, all in preparation to flee from the
impending danger, anticipating the tragedy of the story. “Men whose lives glided on like
rivers,” are exiles; the “rivers” steer their precious cargo to unknown destinations, never
to return. Hearts moved away, hearts watered the soil; hearts were scattered
insignificantly like dust and leaves. Their village of Grand-Pré was absorbed back into
the earth. The echo of exile sounds in the almost palpable silence of this prelapsarian
stanza:
Meanwhile apart, in the twilight gloom of a window’s embrasure,
Sat the lovers, and whispered together, beholding the moon rise
Over the pallid sea and the silvery mist of the meadows.
Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.27
The lovers are framed and pictured like the silhouettes of pre-photographic days.
Longfellow uses the metaphor of blossoming stars, animating and renaming them as
flowers whose description captures a pathos mingled with a hope of heaven. The vignette
does double-duty: it draws a peaceful romantic scene, but also foreshadows the trials to
come of their lives as they quietly look to a life beyond. Gabriel and Evangeline’s lives
are parallel wanderings.
The emotional tone of the poem underscores the melancholy of exile rather than
the “iniquities of oppression.”28 The violence is portrayed passively; the brutality of the
British troops is muted. Evangeline, as a metaphor for the Acadian people, is a metaphor
of exodus. It is difficult to separate her odyssey from that of her people. She becomes a10
national allegory of loss.29 Both suffer losses inherent in exile: loss of tradition, loss of
livelihood, dooming them to lives of poverty; loss of dignity, loss of language, and loss of
a national identity.
Evangeline wanders through the “wilderness,” stranded between two worlds. She
searches for her lost love, Gabriel, the only remaining link with her roots. He could just
as easily picture the home of Acadie. After so many years, after a lifetime of wandering,
one gets the sense in the poem that her search is no longer really for the person; rather, he
has become a representation of roots, of longing and belonging. Longfellow expresses
the diminution of Evangeline’s hopes as they become fainter with the passage of time:
Sometimes a rumor, a hearsay, an inarticulate whisper,
Came with its airy hand to point and beckon her forward.30
Gabriel is a relatively minor character in the poem, at once illusive and allusive –a
home lost to her. There is little description of him, and no character development; his
wanderings seem to progress tangentially from Evangeline’s. One does not get the sense
that he is looking for her, as much as he is wandering from his own pain. Over time he is
transformed into a timeless ideal, no longer attainable in its original form. This is an
honest admission on Evangeline’s part:
Gabriel was not forgotten. Within her heart was his image:
Clothed in the beauty of love and youth, as last she beheld him,
Only more beautiful made by his deathlike silence and absence.
Into her thoughts of him time entered not, for it was not.
Over him the years had no power; he was not changed, but transfigured;
….This was the lesson a life of trial and sorrow had taught her.31
It is not difficult to find biblical motifs in the story. Evangeline’s name has a
missionary ring to it. She carries the “gospel,” the good news of the possibility of living
outside of the confines of self and circumstances. She catches something of the11
faithfulness and devotion of Ruth, following Naomi into a foreign land. The wanderings
of the Acadians echo the Hebrew exodus; they are “strangers and aliens.”
Evangeline eventually settles down to a life of ministering to the poor as a Sister
of Mercy, in Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, endeavoring to work through the
tragedies of her life by rechanneling her grief, pouring herself into others that have
experienced hardship. She identifies with them and needs to make sense of her own life,
to make it count for something, so that hers is not a life wasted or a monument to the
success of the expulsion:
So was her love diffused, but, like to some odorous spices,
Suffered no waste nor loss, though filling the air with aroma.
Other hope had she none, nor wish in life, but to follow,
Meekly with reverent steps, the sacred feet of her Saviour.
Thus many years she lived as a Sister of Mercy; frequenting
Lonely and wretched roofs in the crowded land of the city,
Where distress and want concealed themselves from the sunlight….
Night after night when the world was asleep…..the watchman…..
Met he that meek, pale face, returning home from its watchings.32
On her last day, she enters the almshouse and walks past the “hearts”:
And, as she looked around, she saw how Death, the consoler,
Laying his hand upon many a heart, had healed it forever.33
Her outlook was based on her quiet faith; Death is not an enemy to be feared, but a healer
to be welcomed. Her figurative journey ends when she treats a destitute dying patient
whom she recognizes as Gabriel. Evangeline finds him only to lose him:
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!34
The seemingly abbreviated ending of this domestic epic would have appealed to its
contemporary audience.35 Evangeline’s travails have come to an end. Her hallmark virtue12
of patience that is praised throughout the poem is revealed as a “dull, deep, constant
anguish.” She does not wear her virtuous demeanor like a paper doll dress; Longfellow
portrays her as a heroine who, while stylized, stops short of sentimentality. Her
motivations are driven by her quiet faith tempered with pragmatism.
Longfellow was not outspoken with regard to his political views, but he ended up
making a very political statement by publishing Evangeline.36 He did not use
inflammatory speech, but a narrative of hushed reverie. Evangeline is an American icon
as well as Acadian one, symbolizing the expanding culture of nineteenth century
America. Her story is a one of loss and founding. Her search builds in her the character
that becomes. It is not a futile search.
This “sound literary taste” has taken a beating from the forces of modernism,
making Evangeline a victim once again, not that she ever saw herself as such. Simplicity,
nobility and purity may be outré in modern times; there is no angst in this story to appeal
to modern palates. Originality is to be found in the craftsmanship of the poem, rather in
the content or theme; framing it in an antique poetic meter was innovative and successful.
The simple beauty of Longfellow’s poem may be too subtle for most contemporary
readers. Evangeline, for the older reader, conjures up from the mists of time, that forest
primeval and a simple love and devotion, tempered with patience and perseverance. For
the younger reader, if there is one, Evangeline is an old story, in an old poetic form, by an
old writer without issues. The poem defies deconstruction; one would rather pull the
petals from a flower than dissect the poem. It wanders unselfconsciously along the misty
trajectory of a displaced heroine, representing a displaced people.13
The current neglect of the poem mirrors the poignancy of its story: a people exiled
and wandering, looking for a home while longing for the old one; a poem and a poet
exiled from the current canon, patiently waiting for rediscovery; perhaps her long-
suffering constancy will win out once more.14
Notes
1. Haralson, Eric L. “Mars in Petticoats: Longfellow and Sentimental
Masculinity.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 51, No. 3. (Dec., 1996), 327.
2. Quetchenbach, Bernard. “Evangeline: an Overview.” Acadian Archives, Univ.
of Maine, (29 Apr. 1997), http://www.umfk.maine.edu/archives/evangeline/benny.htm
3. Ibid.
3. Derbyshire, John.“Longfellow & the Fate of Modern Poetry.” The New
Criterion, (Vol.19, No.4, Dec.2000), http://newcriterion.com/archive/19/dec00/longfellow.htm
4. Noyes, Alfred. Longfellow’s Poetical Works, (London: Collins Press, 1935), 5.
5. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Evangeline.” Review of Evangeline, by Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow. Salem Advertiser (13 Nov. 1847), 234.
6. McClatchy, J.D. ed. “Longfellow’s Poems and Other Writings,” New York
Times Book Review, Library of America, (July, 2001), http://loa.org/article.jsp?art=163
7. Quetchenbach.
8. Buell, Lawrence. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Selected Poems, (New York:
Penguin, 1988), 28.
9. Ibid, 18.
10. Arvin, Newton. Longfellow: His Life and Work, (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.,
1963), 102.
11. Ibid, 114.
12. Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. “El Gran Poeta Longfellow and a Psalm of Exile.”
American Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 3. (Autumn, 1998), 395.
13. Sayrs, William C. Practical Grammar: based upon the text of Longfellow’s
“Evangeline” and a selection from Prescott’s “Conquest of Mexico, (Boston, Lothrop
Publishing Company, 1903), 2.
14. Herbin, John F. The History of Grand-Pré. (Wolfville, Nova Scotia: Barnes &
Co., 1913) 129.
15. Ibid, 128.
16. Scudder, Horace E., ed. American Poems: Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant,
Holmes, Lowell, Emerson, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1892), 40.
17. Herbin, 8.
18. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Evangeline, (New York, Grosset & Dunlap,
1859,1900), 568-571. All quotes taken from this edition.
19. Scudder, 5.
20. Ibid, 9.
21. Hawthorne, 235.
22. Buell, 12.
23. Longfellow, 23.
24. Ibid, 11.
25. Ibid, 328-329.
26. Ibid, 1-12.
27. Ibid, 348.
28. Arvin, 104.
29. Gruesz, 412.
30. Longfellow, 699-700.15 31. Ibid, 1276-83. 32. Ibid, 1284-96. 33. Ibid, 1347-48. 34. Ibid, 1376-88. 35. Gruesz, 15. 36. Arvin, 103.
16
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Lowell, Emerson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1892.You can also read
