"Sail On, O Ship of State"

I want to touch on two poems by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  The first poem is the subject of today's post, while the second one will be the subject of my next post.  And, if you are familiar with Longfellow, they are not the two poems that you are probably thinking of.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Longfellow, he was one of the most popular and well-known poets of his day.  One of his friends once said that "no other poet was so fully recognized in his lifetime."  Longfellow is actually one of the few American writers to be honored with a place in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey in London (the others are T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and Washington Irving.  Importantly, most of the commemorations in Poet's Corner are memorial tablets, busts, or stones placed long after the individual's death and not actual burials.  Longfellow is actually buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Longfellow's poems helped shape the American identity and character, perhaps best illustrated by his poem, Paul Revere's Ride.  Who can forget the iconic first line of that poem, "Listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere"?  His other famous poem is The Song of Hiawatha, which tells the story of a fictional Ojibwe warrior named Hiawatha (my first introduction to this poem was via Bugs Bunny in the Looney Tunes episode, "Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt" which first appeared in 1941 and has since been criticized for its derogatory depiction of Native Americans).  

Today, I want to talk a little about Longfellow's poem, The Building of the Ship.  Longfellow wrote this masterpiece in 1849.  The poem can be taken literally as the description of the ship-building process that Longfellow observed in the shipyards of his native Portland, Maine.  But that would only be of interest to those of us interested in the wooden ships from the Age of Sail.  The poem is better understood as metaphor - it is an allegory of the growth of the United States!  The ship in the poem is named, appropriately enough, Union.  Let's remember what was going on in our nation's history during 1849.  The Union continued to be threatened with secession of the southern slave-holding states, and the discovery of gold in California prompted the famous "Gold Rush".  Longfellow was a staunch abolitionist and was good friends with fellow abolitionist and U.S. Senator, Charles Sumner (Sumner was famously and viciously beaten with a cane by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks on the Senate floor).  Longfellow had dinner with Sumner on November 11, 1849, who had just delivered a speech at the Free Soil Meeting at Tremont Temple in Boston.  Longfellow was inspired to write a poem, which became The Building of the Ship.

On the eve of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln quoted a passage from Longfellow's poem, "Sail On, O Ship of State!"  According to Lincoln's secretary, John Nicolay, Lincoln was moved to tears upon reading the poem.  Nicolay said, "These lines seemed to stir something deep in Lincoln.  His eyes filled with tears and his cheeks were wet.  He did not speak for some minutes, but finally said with simplicity, 'It is a wonderful gift to be able to stir men like that!'"

On the eve of another national crisis, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a handwritten message (ironically delivered by Wendell Wilkie, who Roosevelt had just defeated in the 1940 Presidential Election) to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill with a passage from Longfellow's poem:

...Sail on, O Ship of State!

Sail on, O UNION, strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears,

With all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

Roosevelt added his own note, writing "applies to you people as it does to us."  Churchill quickly understood, as Roosevelt knew that he would, the meaning and importance of the passage.  He relayed the same message in a radio broadcast to the British public, and the five lines about "the Ship of State" were printed in newspapers, cards, pictures, and calendars throughout both America and England.

From the opening stanza:

Build me straight, O worthy Master!

Stanch and strong, a goodly vessel,

That shall laugh at all disaster,

And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!

to the last one:

Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!

Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee,

Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,

Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,

Are all with thee, are all with thee!

Longfellow's poem is a prayer for our country.  It is a prayer for all of us.  And in today's holiday season, it is a prayer for peace and goodwill.  It's a long poem, but it's well worth a read.