Elliot's Oak
Elliot's Oak - meaning Summary
Voice of a Vanished Tongue
Longfellow addresses an ancient oak as a living witness whose rustling leaves deliver incomprehensible but distinct voices. The speaker hears in that sound the preserved memory of John Eliot, the missionary who translated the Bible into a Native American language now lost. The oak becomes the sole keeper of that vanished tongue and of a vanished people, linking nature’s continuity to cultural disappearance and historical loss.
Read Complete AnalysesThou ancient oak! whose myriad leaves are loud With sounds of unintelligible speech, Sounds as of surges on a shingly beach, Or multitudinous murmurs of a crowd; With some mysterious gift of tongues endowed, Thou speakest a different dialect to each; To me a language that no man can teach, Of a lost race, long vanished like a cloud. For underneath thy shade, in days remote, Seated like Abraham at eventide Beneath the oaks of Mamre, the unknown Apostle of the Indians, Eliot, wrote His Bible in a language that hath died And is forgotten, save by thee alone.
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