Excelsior (Longfellow)

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Longfellow's poem was originally printed in the 1841 edition of Ballads and Other Poems, which also included other well-known poems such as The Wreck of the Hesperus

Excelsior is a brief poem written and published in 1841 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The famous Sam Lloyd chess problem, Excelsior, was named after this poem.

The poem describes a young man passing through a town bearing the banner "Excelsior" (translated from Latin as "ever higher", also loosely but more widely as "onward and upward"), ignoring all warnings, climbing higher until inevitably, "lifeless, but beautiful" he lies half-buried in the snow.

The poem was a staple of American readers for many years, and A Plea for Old Cap Collier by Irvin S. Cobb, satirized it. His description is partly based on an illustration used in the readers. The words quoted are Longfellow's:

The shades of night were falling fast,

As through an Alpine village passed

A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,

A banner with the strange device,

Excelsior!

There we get an accurate pen picture of his young man's deplorable state. He is climbing a mountain in the dead of winter. It is made plain later on that he is a stranger in the neighborhood, consequently it is fair to assume that the mountain in question is one he has never climbed before. Nobody hired him to climb any mountain; he isn't climbing it on a bet or because somebody dared him to climb one. He is not dressed for mountain climbing. Apparently he is wearing the costume in which he escaped from the institution where he had been an inmate--a costume consisting simply of low stockings, sandals and a kind of flowing woolen nightshirt, cut short to begin with and badly shrunken in the wash. He has on no rubber boots, no sweater, not even a pair of ear muffs. He also is bare-headed. Well, any time the wearing of hats went out of fashion he could have had no use for his head, anyhow.

The title of Excelsior was reportedly inspired by the state seal of New York, which bears the Latin motto Excelsior. Longfellow had seen it earlier on a scrap of newspaper. ^[1] Longfellow's first draft, now in the Harvard University Library, notes that he finished the poem at three o'clock in the morning on 28 September, 1841.^[2]

[edit] Notes

^ Calhoun, Charles C. (2005). Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life, Beacon Press, 140. ISBN 0-8070-7039-4.
^ Cahoon, Herbert; Lange, Thomas V.; Ryskamp, Charles (1977). American Literary Autographs, from Washington Irving to Henry James, Courier Dover Publications, 34. ISBN 0-486-23548-3.