Memories
Memories - meaning Summary
Memory's Persistent Root
Longfellow reflects on people once close whose presence has receded into the speaker’s life like overgrown graves. He wonders whether these absent figures remember him and whether their memories remain pleasant. The poem treats remembrance as both fragile—like withering flowers—and enduring—like a perennial root—suggesting that outward signs of change need not erase an underlying, lasting attachment.
Read Complete AnalysesOft I remember those I have known In other days, to whom my heart was lead As by a magnet, and who are not dead, But absent, and their memories overgrown With other thoughts and troubles of my own, As graves with grasses are, and at their head The stone with moss and lichens so o'er spread, Nothing is legible but the name alone. And is it so with them? After long years. Do they remember me in the same way, And is the memory pleasant as to me? I fear to ask; yet wherefore are my fears? Pleasures, like flowers, may wither and decay, And yet the root perennial may be.
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