SOURCE: “A Note on Longfellow's Poetic,” in American Literature, Vol. 24, No. 1, March, 1952, pp. 77-83.

In the following essay, Abele analyzes the major analogy of Longfellow's “Seaweed.”

Longfellow's “Seaweed,” a poem published in 1845,¹ is interesting mainly because its theme is a theory of poetry from which the working out of the poem deviates rather noticeably, so that the poem really produces irony unintended by its author. The fundamental technique is the extensive treatment of a metaphoric analogy by means of a meticulous series of substantive and syntactic parallels. This rather common approach may be used for various reasons: because the poet feels that analogical presentation will clarify his theme, because he feels that the theme is actually contained in the analogy, because he feels that the analogy will contribute a desirable affective aura, because he believes it is “poetic” to deal in analogies rather than in direct propositions. The...