Holidays
Holidays - meaning Summary
Private Celebrations of Feeling
Longfellow’s poem celebrates private, inward holidays — quiet, self-kept anniversaries of feeling. It describes sudden joys and lasting happy days that arise within the heart, often unexpectedly like flames from ashes or swallows on the wind. These memories are imagined as pure, pale images — a gleaming sail, a fading cloud, a lily — and finally as a lovely, dreamlike fairy-land known only to the mind.
Read Complete AnalysesThe holiest of all holidays are those Kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the heart, When the full river of feeling overflows;-- The happy days unclouded to their close; The sudden joys that out of darkness start As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart Like swallows singing down each wind that blows! White as the gleam of a receding sail, White as a cloud that floats and fades in air, White as the whitest lily on a stream, These tender memories are;--a fairy tale Of some enchanted land we know not where, But lovely as a landscape in a dream.
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