The Song of Hiawatha

About

Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha (1855), written in the trochaic tetrameter of the Finnish Kalevala, is the first major American poem to center Indigenous mythology and narrative: Hiawatha, the Ojibwe culture hero, woos Minnehaha, battles the spirit of fever, and at last departs westward with the coming of Christianity. The poem's meter — once memorized by nearly every American schoolchild — is simultaneously hypnotic and easy to parody, a problem Longfellow could not have foreseen. The lakeside narrative and the death of Minnehaha are the most affecting passages.