The Song Of Hiawatha 11 Hiawathas Wedding Feast - Analysis

A wedding feast that doubles as a contest for attention

This section of The Song of Hiawatha treats the wedding-feast as more than a meal: it becomes a small stage on which different kinds of power compete. Longfellow’s central idea is that joy is made—carefully, socially, and sometimes competitively. Nokomis organizes abundance and hospitality (the bass-wood bowls white and polished, the bison-horn spoons black and polished), and then three performers—Pau-Puk-Keewis, Chibiabos, and Iagoo—each tries to keep the guests more contented. The repeated line about making the feast more joyous turns pleasure into a task, almost a public obligation, and sets up the tension: celebration is communal, but the spotlight is individual.

Nokomis’s abundance—and the strange silence at the center

The feast is described with proud specificity: sturgeon and pike, pemican and marrow, yellow cakes of the Mondamin, and wild rice of the river. Yet the emotional center isn’t the food; it’s the hosts’ restraint. Hiawatha, Laughing Water, and Nokomis tasted not and served their guests in silence. That quiet service makes generosity feel almost ceremonial: the couple’s happiness is expressed indirectly, through what they provide and what they withhold from themselves. Even the smoking ritual—pipes of red stone, tobacco from the South-land mixed with bark of the red willow—extends hospitality into the air everyone shares, as if the feast must become a shared atmosphere, not merely shared dishes.

Pau-Puk-Keewis: performance that turns the world into weather

Pau-Puk-Keewis arrives as pure spectacle: swan’s-down plumes, fox-tails on his heels, a feather fan, a face barred with streaks of bright color, and hair parted like a woman’s—a look that’s deliberately crafted and a little provocative. His dance starts controlled—treading softly like a panther—and then escalates until it seems to rewrite the landscape. The poem’s most vivid exaggeration is that his stamping raises a wind strong enough to heap the shore into Sand Dunes and Sand Hills. This is entertainment as disruption: he is called the Storm-Fool, and the dance literally becomes a storm. The contradiction in his portrait is that he’s dismissed by warriors as Faint-Heart and gambler, yet adored by women and the maidens; social prestige and social desire pull in different directions, and the dance lets him win without fighting.

Chibiabos: love-song as a private truth spoken in public

After the whirlwind, the poem pivots into intimacy. Chibiabos sings while Looking still at Hiawatha and Laughing Water, turning the feast into a kind of witnessing. His language is tender and repetitive—I am happy, I am happy; Leap to meet thee, leap to meet thee—as if emotion can only be said by saying it twice. The refrain Onaway! Awake, beloved! doesn’t sound like ordinary flirting; it sounds like an insistence that love is a waking state, a heightened attention. He measures feeling through nature’s changes: the heart brightens like river ripples in sun, darkens when clouds drop shadows. Compared to Pau-Puk-Keewis’s outward storm, Chibiabos makes weather internal—love becomes the climate of perception. That shift in tone (from frenetic to hushed and devotional) shows the feast’s deeper purpose: not just to amuse, but to name what the marriage means.

Iagoo: jealousy, comedy, and the hunger to be needed

The poem then turns again, this time into social comedy sharpened by envy. Iagoo watches the applause Chibiabos receives and becomes Jealous, reading the room—Saw in all their looks and gestures—and deciding it’s his turn. His specialty is not music or dance but immeasurable falsehoods, and the poem delights in his compulsive one-upmanship: no arrow shot half so far, no dive so deep, no journey so wondrous. Yet Longfellow complicates the joke by reminding us that this same man carved the cradle of the infant Hiawatha and taught him to make bows and arrows. Iagoo’s boasting is ridiculous, but it may also be a strategy for staying relevant—an older figure trying to remain central by turning himself into a living entertainment.

A sharper question the feast leaves hanging

If the hosts themselves tasted not and the guests need constant prompting to be more contented, what does the poem suggest about happiness here—does it arise naturally, or must it be manufactured by spectacle, song, and story? The very success of Chibiabos’s sincerity creates Iagoo’s jealousy, as if even tenderness becomes a kind of competition once it’s performed before a crowd.