The Song Of Hiawatha Introduction And Vocabulary - Analysis

A frame that claims: these stories come from the land itself

The introduction works hard to make one central claim: the Song of Hiawatha is not something the poet invents so much as something he passes along, as if the North American landscape were already singing and he is only translating its sound. The opening question—whence these stories?—invites skepticism, and the answer is deliberately physical: odors of the forest, dew and damp of meadows, curling smoke of wigwams. Even the poem’s own style is folded into that claim: it has frequent repetitions and wild reverberations like thunder in the mountains. In other words, the poem argues that its very rhythm and echo are not an aesthetic choice alone; they are meant to feel like a natural phenomenon.

Nawadaha as a guarantee of orality—and a useful distance

Longfellow’s speaker doesn’t say I made this; he says I repeat them as I heard them from the lips of Nawadaha, the musician and sweet singer. Nawadaha becomes both a source and a buffer: a named figure who supplies authority, while also placing the poet one step removed from direct ownership. That double function creates a tension the introduction never resolves: it wants the prestige of closeness to Indigenous tradition—From the land of the Ojibways, the Dacotahs, the great lakes of the Northland—but it also wants the safety of saying the poet is merely a listener. The repeated phrase I should answer, I should tell you has a slightly practiced air, like a prepared defense against the charge that these materials are not truly his to speak.

Where the songs come from: nests, hoofprints, marshes

When the speaker explains where Nawadaha found the songs, he pushes the origin story beyond any single human community into a near-mythic ecology: In the bird’s-nests, In the lodges of the beaver, In the hoofprint of the bison, In the eyry of the eagle. These are not libraries or archives; they are dwellings, traces, and perches—places where life leaves marks. The roll call of birds—Chetowaik the plover, Mahng the loon, Wawa the wild-goose, the heron Shuh-shuh-gah, the grouse Mushkodasa—turns the natural world into a choir. Yet the marshes are also called melancholy, which complicates the pastoral sweetness: the songs are not cute nature music; they rise out of wet, shadowed places where sound carries and loneliness is plausible.

Tawasentha: a seasonal map of time and persistence

The description of Nawadaha’s home, the vale of Tawasentha, shifts the poem into a calmer, steadier attentiveness. The water-courses can be “traced” through the year by changing signs: rushing in the Spring-time, alders in the Summer, white fog in the Autumn, black line in the Winter. This is not just scenery; it’s an argument that the song belongs to cycles older than any individual—something that persists through transformation. The pine groves are Ever sighing, ever singing, a phrase that makes nature itself sound like a continuous, half-sorrowful performance. In that setting, Nawadaha sings of Hiawatha’s wondrous birth and being, but also his labor: he lived, and toiled, and suffered so that the tribes of men might prosper. The hero is defined less by conquest than by endurance for others, which fits the valley’s quiet insistence on seasonal return.

The turn to Ye who love: recruiting the reader’s faith

The most noticeable turn comes when the speaker stops answering questions and starts calling to an audience: Ye who love Nature, Ye who love a nation’s legends, Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple. The tone becomes sermon-like—urgent, inviting, confident that the right kind of listener already exists. The poem carefully defines that ideal listener: someone who can hear voices from afar off and accept speech that sounds plain and childlike, someone who has faith in God and Nature and believes Every human heart is human. This is where the introduction’s deepest tension surfaces. It asks the reader to embrace Indigenous people as fully human—capable of longings, yearnings, strivings—but it does so using the condescending vocabulary of the period, calling them savage bosoms and describing them as groping blindly in the darkness. Compassion and hierarchy arrive in the same breath. The invitation is genuine, yet it is framed as a moral lesson for outsiders, not as an address to an Indigenous audience.

A daring implication: is simple another way to control the story?

The introduction keeps praising simplicity—simple story, tones so plain—but it also spends lavishly on orchestration: thunder, eagles, innumerable echoes. That contrast raises an uncomfortable possibility: calling the legend simple may be less about the tale itself and more about making it manageable for the reader being courted. When the speaker promises language so clear the ear can’t tell whether they are sung or spoken, he’s offering not only intimacy, but ease—an assurance that no hard foreignness will remain.

The graveyard inscription: the poem as a found relic

The final address shifts again, this time to a very specific scene: a country walk past tangled barberry-bushes with crimson berries, stone walls gray with mosses, and a neglected graveyard. The reader pauses over a half-effaced inscription, written with little skill but full of hope and heart-break. By comparing his poem to that “rude inscription,” Longfellow makes a last, strategic claim about how to read the Song: not as polished art demanding expert judgment, but as a weathered message from elsewhere, deserving tenderness. It’s a powerful ending because it turns the act of reading into an act of listening at a grave—quiet, receptive, and aware of loss. The introduction’s ambition, then, is to make the legend feel both vast as the great rivers and intimate as a name you can barely decipher, and to persuade the reader that to attend to it is a kind of moral attention.