A Psalm Of Life

Given its intended audience, a mass-market readership of modestly-educated, upper middle-class readers coming to a monthly magazine as much for diversion and entertainment as for moral guidance and instruction, the poem uses one of poetry’s most familiar and least intimidating formal structures: the tightly rhymed quatrain. The poem repeats that structure without any variety, each of the nine quatrain-stanzas thus working to reenforce a sense of familiarity as the pattern repeats, a formal strategy that in turn creates a confidence in a reader, a sense of knowing exactly where the poem is going.

In addition, the poem follows a tight end-rhyme scheme, ABAB, that creates a musical feel to the poem, appropriate given that within the Judeo-Christian tradition of psalms the verses are often sung. Indeed, Longfellow’s poem has been transcribed into a variety of musical forms, including gospel, hymns, folk, and country. Given the poem’s careful sonic texture of assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds within the same line) as well as consonance and alliteration (the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line) that sense of music is enhanced.