Notes
1] "Composed in the summer of 1839 `while sitting at my chamber window, on one of the balmiest nights of the year. I endeavored to reproduce the impression of the hour and scene.'" (Editor, p. 19.)
The epigraph comes from Homer's Iliad, VIII, 488: "Welcome, three times prayed for."
21] Orestes-like: Orestes killed his mother Clytemnestra to take revenge for the murder of her husband Agamemnon, which she managed with the help of her lover Aegisthus. In Aeschylus' Eumenides, Orestes finds the peace Longfellow mentions here.
Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.
Original text: The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with Bibliographical and Critical Notes, Riverside Edition (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890), I, 19-20. PS 2250 E90 Robarts Library.
First publication date:
1839
Publication date note: In Voices of the Night
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 1998.
Recent editing: 4:2002/4/4
Composition date:
1839
Composition date note: Summer 1839
Rhyme: abab