By the giggle of the gaggle,
by the drops that must bedraggle,
just imagine that Longfella
shaking out his big umbrella,
sitting down to tea with Missus.
(But no need to rhyme these verses.)
Can you pass me, please, the pepper?
Hiawatha? How progressing?
Very well it is my darling.
What's that noise? It is a starling.
In the unlit stove it's flapping.
Now, that chimney sure needs capping.
Charlie, Ernest and sweet Fanny,
please don't fuss about with Annie.
Edith, Alice, you please give her
tiny chunks of that good liver.
Ernest! Fiddle not with matches;
you should know how fire catches.
See the children round the table,
how they trochee as they gabble,
how they bounce and flounce their speeches.
They would trochee on the beaches;
they would trochee by the rivers;
they would trochee like good givers;
they would trochee, trochee, trochee,
all to help their dear, dear daddy;
he's so popular and steady.
...............................
The song of Hiawatha is not a rhyming poem but involves a skillful use of repetition at the beginning of lines, called parallelism. I just wanted to write in couplets so I did, concluding it with a triplet, for luck.
A 'trochee' is a metrical foot (no wriggling toes on it) that goes DA - di instead of the iamb which goes, di-DA. English naturally seems to iamb along a lot like that, but Trochees bounce so lusty!
Anyway Longfellow chose trochaic verse to give a different feel which he felt might fit the Amerind, despite the fact that it comes from the Finnish poetic culture exemplified in the Kalevala, an epic compiled from fragments of folk poetry, which Longfellow had read from when spending a summer in Finland in 1835 learning something of the language. In Finnish all words are accented on the first syllable, so it is more naturally trochaic than English is iambic . Hiawatha was different - but not Amerind. No. Strangely, there was another poet-fella called Schoolcraft who beat Longfellow to the trochee four-beat Amerind poem writing a romance called Alhalla in 1843. Was it just those drums they went by? However the parallelism in Longfellow's poem, the rhetorical repetitions at the beginning of lines, IS characteristic of the Ojibwe tribe.
Unfortunately, Frances Appleton, Longfellow's second wife, died of burns, a few years after the publication of The Song of Hiawatha, in a home accident. A match caught her dress.
Most info digested from Wiki.
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The Singing Season
PuisiThe Singing Season. That's the spring-time. You'll also like other MajorSeventh poetry collections - and there are so many to choose from.
