A Quiet Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The speaker chooses meditation at home over the pursuit of courtly honors, anticipating a quiet old age and an obscure, solitary death. The speaker contrasts this prospect with dying famous but without self-knowledge.
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · Genre: Sonnet, Meditative Poetry, Philosophical Poetry · 173 words
First lines
Let him who will, by force or fraud innate, / Of courtly grandeurs gain the slippery height; / I, leaving not the home of my delight, / Far from the world and noise will meditate. / Then, without pomps or perils of the great, / I shall behold the day succeed the night; / Behold the alternate seasons take their flight, / And in serene repose old age await. / And so, whenever Death shall come to close / The happy moments that my days compose, / I, full of years, shall die, obscure, alone! / How wretched is the man, with honors crowned, / Who, having not the one thing needful found, / Dies, known to all, but to himself unknown.
Genres
- Sonnet — Fourteen rhymed lines contrast the speaker's chosen retirement with the fate of a celebrated man who lacks self-knowledge.
- Meditative Poetry — The speaker contemplates passing days and seasons, approaching old age, and eventual death.
- Philosophical Poetry — The closing lines judge public honors insufficient when a person remains unknown to himself.
Tags
solitude · meditation · self-knowledge · courtly ambition · old age · mortality
What this Textopian page supports
A Quiet Life is listed on Textopian as a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, dated Date unknown.
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- Work type: Poem
- Author: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Date: Date unknown
- Language: English
- Genres: Sonnet, Meditative Poetry, Philosophical Poetry
- Length: 173 words
- Structure: 1 section, 1 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)
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