Reflection Fireside Poem

The poem I chose to analyze and reflect on was Aftermath by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I chose to analyze this poem because it was short and I thought starting simple would be nice, and also I can relate to what the poem is talking about. The poem is about the time of year when summer has ended and the good part of fall is just coming to a close. It is that gloomy part of the year where plants are no longer pretty, there is no more pretty leaves on the trees, they are now dead on the ground, the weather is bitter, all the birds have migrated, and all that is left is the fields to harvest. It is a pretty gloomy part of the year for me, because it means that cold frigid winter is coming up. The poem is very short and it goes like this, "When the summer fields are mown,
When the birds are fledged and flown,
And the dry leaves strew the path;
With the falling of the snow,
With the cawing of the crow,
Once again the fields we mow
And gather in the aftermath.
Not the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
Not the upland clover bloom;
But the rowen mixed with weeds,
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
In the silence and the gloom. "(Longfellow). This basically just means everything that is left from summer is gone including the birds, the leaves, the fields, there is no sweet grass or flowers. All that is left is weeds, dead plants, and snow is coming. Everyone is just in silence and gloom. I completely agree with Longfellow because this is an extremely gloomy part of the year, and here in central Illinois all of these things occur.

You can tell this is a Romanticism piece because the theme of the poem is a nature. It is about what nature does at a certain part of the year. It also uses many discription words such as dry leaves, sweet with flowrs, upland clover bloom. Both nature and being discriptive are two characteristics of a Romanticism piece. At 66 years of age when he wrote this poem, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had seen many summers come and go. In its seventh line the poem states that its title refers to the gleanings of a single year's last mowing, the poet also may have been thinking of his life after he reached retirement age, the so-called golden years(Huff). Both the time of the year, and the timing in his life would have been gloomy at that point. I think however that Longfellow is probably writing about the time of the year more, I may just think this because I am young and do not know what that part of life would be like and I can easily relate to the part of the year aspect, but I have also read some of his other poems, and one was about the perfect summer days. They were written very closely together and he was not gloomy in the least bit in the other one, because the weather was perfect and none of those changes he mentioned in this poem were occuring which is why I think it is more about the time of the year because if he is happy in the other one where he is the same age but has nice weather then it has to be more about the nature and weather more than the time of his life.

Huff, Randall. "'Aftermath'." The Facts On File Companion to American Poetry, vol. 1. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= CPAP0010&SingleRecord=True (accessed December 7, 2011).


Longfellow, Henry W. "Aftermath." PoemHunter.Com - Thousands of Poems and Poets.. Poetry Search Engine. Web. 07 Dec. 2011.