A Psalm Of Life

In the second stanza, when the young man acknowledges, to himself as much as to the reader, that “[d]ust thou art, to dust returnest” (Line 7), he establishes the reality of mortality that no brave words, no courageous dreaming, no soaring spirit can avoid.

Death cannot be overcome or tricked. The poem, however, argues that in accepting death as a reality and an inevitability there is the threat of surrendering life itself to that considerable gravitational pull. To live like that is not to live at all. This concerns the young man, himself among them as he argues his case to the psalmist, those who, challenged by the unavoidable sorrows and trials of life, decide to abandon living itself. They render ironic the heroic will to engage every moment, to dare to make life worth being lived. Longfellow’s is no chirpy optimism. At the time of the poem’s drafting, he was himself 31 years old and working through the tragedy of losing both his child and his wife. At that threshold age, a midlife crisis moment, Longfellow uses the young man in the poem to dismiss surrender as contemptible, really the easy way out. There is no doubt in the young man’s perception that life is anything but easy.