Parodies of 'Hiawatha'

[AdamSmith]

Browsing at random, just turned up this delightful survey of the many parodies across the years of Longfellow's 'Song of Hiawatha.'

http://udspace.udel.edu/bitstream/handle/19716/4663/article5.pdf?sequence=1

[MsGuy]

Bumping around somewhere in the back crevasses of my brain is the memory of a Mad Magazine parody of Hiawatha (seems like it was illustrated by Don Martin) but since your source has over-looked it and I can't find any pics to confirm its existence, maybe it's just one more hallucinatory brain fart in the final stages of my descent into senility.

If so, that's sad because, if real, it would have had some goods points to stick in my memory so long. There are a few hints in net space of such a parody in the 100th Anniversary issue but no solid proof. Too bad 'cause it would have been nice to have re-read it (assuming its actual existence).

I did love my Don Martin so maybe it's all to the best to live with my gently glowing memory of it rather than confront a disappointing reality.

[AdamSmith]

I do believe I remember that Mad parody too. But likewise can't find it now.

Another one I can't find now is a side-splittingly obscene one:

"...Slid her lips along his tent pole,

Slid them up and down his tent pole,

Fell back splattered on the mud floor..."

Etc.

Saw that in some hardcopy anthology years ago, in a used book store in Harvard Square. One of those things I curse myself for not buying at the time, now lost to the ages.

[MsGuy]

I do believe I remember that Mad parody too. But likewise can't find it now.

But how can you be sure it's not a false memory springing full born into existence from my post like Athena from the head of Zeus?

[AdamSmith]

P.S. The Internets suggest, maddengly vaguely, that the parody was in this issue:

...but I can't find any contents of it online.

[lookin]

Is this it?

In the bar called Gitchee-Goomee

Where they serve the giggle water

Way up town on Eighty-Second

Near the Restaurant Nokomis

Up by Feldman's bagel factory

There the shoe clerk, Melvin Watha,

Guzzles cola laced with bourbon

Gets ideas then of much grandeur

Thinks he owns a pipestone quarry

Says he's Wally Cox the mighty

Pounds the bar and gets more sullen

Doesn't pay the least attention

When the far more cheery drunkards

Call out gaily, "Hiya, Watha!"

Downs one shot and then another

Laps it up till eyes get bleary

Falls across the bar unconscious.

[MsGuy]

Yes that rings a bell familiar

Silly verbiage full of giggle

Still one wants the art work truly

Funny art work, full of laughter

Good Don Martin's floppy shoe tips

Bring life to the awful writing

So I'm thinking, please forgive me

How I long to see the drawings

Big nosed sketches of the people

Happy faces calling gaily

Drunken Watha drinking liquor

Downing shots beyond his limit

Dreaming of that pipestone quarry

Lap it up dear shoe clerk Watha

'Till you fall across the counter

Way up town on Eighty-Second

In the bar called Gitchee-Goomee.

[AdamSmith]

Seriouser observations by one of my profs at Jale ...

BOOKEND / By J. D. MCCLATCHY

Return to Gitche Gumee

hen Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was in England in 1868 to receive an honorary degree from Cambridge University, Queen Victoria invited him to tea. She was a great admirer of his work and found his company delightful. When she accompanied the poet to the door and watched him walk down the long palace corridor, she saw something slightly disconcerting. ''I noticed,'' she confided to her diary that night, ''an unusual interest among the attendants and servants. I could scarcely credit that they so generally understood who he was. When he took leave, they concealed themselves in places from which they could get a good look at him as he passed. I have since inquired among them, and am surprised and pleased to find that many of his poems are familiar to them. No other distinguished person has come here that has excited so peculiar an interest.''

Monarch and manservant, curate and carpetbagger, the whole world read Longfellow. He outsold Browning and Tennyson. In the White House, Lincoln asked to have Longfellow's poems recited to him, and wept.

When the emperor of Brazil made a state visit to the United States, his only request was to have dinner with Longfellow. The poet's 70th birthday, in 1877, was a day of national celebration, commemorated by parading schoolchildren around the country. It was proclaimed on that day that ''there is no man living for whom there is so universal a feeling of love and gratitude, and no man who ever wore so great a fame so gently and simply.''

His popularity marked a literary milestone. It could be said that Longfellow was our first professional poet. Not only was he able to make a living from his writing but he worked carefully to establish for American poetry a cultural eminence. He was both professor and balladeer; that is to say, he had literary qualities that rarely coincide and from either sideline are usually sneered at. He had an authority based on learning and allusion, gaining for his work an intellectual respect. And he had a narrative gift both sweeping and canny, along with a near perfect ear, that made his work memorable and gave it an enormous popular appeal.

Longfellow had earned his considerable prestige. From the start, he held himself to the highest literary standards, and was deeply admired by Hawthorne and Emerson, by Dickens and Ruskin. For many years, he taught comparative literature at Harvard, where he introduced Dante, Goethe and Moliere into the curriculum. He had as well the fabled energies of the Victorian man of letters. Early in his career he traveled widely, mastered 11 languages and had the entire European literary tradition in his head. He was an indefatigable anthologist (one alone ran to 31 volumes), compiler, textbook author, diarist and correspondent (so besieged was he by admirers that he eventually wrote about 1,500 letters a year), and he composed in every genre: novel, romance, short story, travel sketch, essay, table talk, verse play, translation, epic, sonnet, ballad, elegy and lyric.

Even as a young man, Longfellow aspired to literary eminence. Had he been merely brilliant, all his learning would not have helped him fulfill that ambition. But he cared too for his readers, for the language of their hearts and memories, and they responded. When ''The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems'' was published in 1858, it sold 25,000 copies in the first two months and 10,000 copies in London the first day. There was hardly a home in the United States without its hearthside copy of ''Evangeline.'' And in the wake of ''The Song of Hiawatha,'' in 1855 -- well, the nation is still cluttered with motels and steamboats, summer camps and high schools that bear the name. It was a poem imitated in French by Baudelaire and translated into Latin by Cardinal Newman's brother. As ''Hiawatha's Photographing,'' it was even quickly parodied by Edward Lear. Parody is the last form praise takes; Lear thought Longfellow ''the greatest living master of language,'' but his contemporary sendup (''From his shoulder Hiawatha / Took the camera of rosewood, / Made of sliding, folding rosewood; / Neatly put it all together'') takes primitivism into the drawing room with hilarious consequences.

Longfellow himself was no mandarin. He carefully monitored his sales figures and made certain that in addition to the morocco-bound volumes printed for the carriage trade, there were broadsides and cheap pamphlets available for the common reader. As a result, he was more widely read, more widely appreciated than any American writer of his time. One ironic token of such appreciation is that more of us, even today, can still quote at least the opening of several Longfellow poems, from ''I shot an arrow into the air'' to ''Though the mills of God grind slowly.'' In fact, so well known have many of his phrases become they have achieved the dubious status of cliche -- the patter of little feet,'' for instance, or ''ships that pass in the night'' or ''into each life some rain must fall.'' Here is poem after poem that has sunk into the national consciousness, become an indelible part of the American imagination. How is that possible?

Longfellow lived at a propitious time. He was born in the wake of the Revolutionary War; his grandfather was a colleague of Washington and his father a friend of Lafayette. The great events of the century -- the westward expansion, the debate over slavery, the Civil War -- he had as subjects. And he lived on into the modern extravagances of the Gilded Age; one of his last visitors was Oscar Wilde. His lifetime, in other words, spanned the era when the country sought to define itself, and what Longfellow gave his countrymen -- who spurned history -- was the mythology they needed. Evangeline in the forest primeval, Hiawatha by the shores of Gitche Gumee, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, the wreck of the Hesperus, the village blacksmith under the spreading chestnut tree, the strange courtship of Miles Standish, the maiden Priscilla and the hesitant John Alden, even the lonely striver's footprints on the sands of time -- together they form a nostalgic image of innocence, a people starting over, a muted but forceful heroism in touch with the rhythms and harmonies of the natural world. Both in his poems and in his undervalued novel ''Kavanagh,'' Longfellow creates his Great Good Place. Neither the city nor the wilderness attracts him. Neither the thronged metropolis of Whitman nor the solitary pond of Thoreau draws out his sympathies. Instead, Longfellow feels himself most at home in the village, its dimensions contained, its inhabitants known, its cozy routines established, its eccentric novelties cherished, a civilized community on the edge of the unfamiliar.

At the same time, he boldly helped American poetry welcome European influences, from Germanic legends to Nordic meters, seeking in the term ''American'' not a thumping, homemade vigor but a cosmopolitan openness to foreign resources. In his appetite for the unusual, combined with his extraordinary prosodic virtuosity, he seems an unexpected precursor of W. H. Auden, another poet who sought not to defy tradition but to renovate and extend it.

And then, less than half a century after Longfellow's death, the modernist braves circled and shot him down like a dazed buffalo. Ezra Pound (who, by the way, was Longfellow's grandnephew) and T. S. Eliot were determined to rid the poetic landscape of mawkishness. Narrative was out and the skewered, ego-bound lyric was in. Moralizing was out and psychologizing was in. The elegant and delicate were derided, the fragmented and confessional applauded. Meter and rhyme were considered fustian, and the broken line or free verse effusion was all the rage. Longfellow was officially declared kitsch.

But among the many readers who privately maintained their devotion to the old poet was Robert Frost, in many ways Longfellow's true successor. The title of Frost's first book, ''A Boy's Will,'' is taken from a Longfellow poem, and in 1907, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Longfellow's birth, Frost wrote an affectionate poem, ''The Later Minstrel,'' in which he gratefully acknowledges that, while under Longfellow's spell, ''You wronged the wisdom that you had, / And sighed for vanished days.'' More astutely than most, Frost understood that ''Song's times and seasons are its own, / Its ways past finding out.'' Put aside for a moment your sleek preferences, your ironic prowess, and the minstrel days of old emerge with a remarkable majesty.

Longfellow is not a poet of startling originality, not a Whitman or Dickinson. But he is a much better poet than is now supposed. Yes, he will seem sentimental at times, but from how many Victorian poems would we not nowadays want to snip off the last few, homilizing lines? Still, rereading his best lyrics, one is struck by the twilit, ghostly melancholy of his lost paradises. The moon glides along the damp mysterious chambers of the air, and somber houses are hearsed with plumes of smoke. And the grand narrative poems of his ''Tale of a Wayside Inn'' sequence have a dramatic thrust and vivid portraiture that can evoke one's first, enthralled experiences with stories, the high adventurous romance of those books that helped shape our desires and still abide in our memories. If Longfellow has long since been consigned to your dusty top shelf, it may be time to take him down. You won't just be opening a book, you'll encounter a world sometimes thought lost, but actually as near as a dream.

J. D. McClatchy, a poet and critic, is the editor of Longfellow's ''Poems and Other Writings.''

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/10/22/bookend/bookend.html