The Song Of Hiawatha 12 The Son Of The Evening Star - Analysis

A wedding night that turns into a test of vision

This canto stages a simple but piercing claim: what you call beauty depends on what you’re willing to see. The opening sunset is immediately unstable—first the sun descending, then the Red Swan bleeding color into the waves, then a cosmic bead of wampum on the robes of the Great Spirit. Longfellow makes the world itself a lesson in misrecognition: the same purple-crimson sky can be read as ordinary nature, as wounded creature, or as divine ornament. That shifting perception becomes the human story Iagoo tells, where a community’s laughter misreads a person, and that misreading has consequences as literal as transfiguration.

The tone begins in wonder—questions, dazzled color, trembling light—and then hardens into social cruelty once the tale starts. The poem wants the listener to feel how easily awe can slide into mockery: the same mouth that says Behold it! can also say, a few lines later, What a pity he doesn’t break his neck. The starry frame doesn’t float above the human world; it judges it.

Oweenee’s “wrong” marriage and the poem’s moral bait

Oweenee, silent, dreamy and wayward, does something the group cannot metabolize: she refuses the market of visible status—belts of wampum, paint and feathers—and chooses old Osseo, poor and ugly, always coughing like a squirrel. On the surface, the story looks like a fairy-tale reversal that will justify her choice by revealing Osseo’s hidden nobility. But Longfellow complicates that comfort by making the revelation costly: Osseo’s transformation into a young man is paired with Oweenee’s fall into a weak old woman. The poem refuses the easy moral that inner beauty will simply be rewarded with outward beauty. Instead, it asks whether love can survive the very kind of surface-level judgment Oweenee rejected.

That’s the central tension the story keeps pressing: is love a way of seeing through appearances, or is it another spell that can be broken by appearances? The sisters’ laughter tries to answer by force—by making the couple’s difference shameful. Oweenee answers with a blunt, almost defiant simplicity: I am happy with Osseo!—a line that sounds less like romance than like resistance.

The oak trunk: where ridicule meets the sacred

The hinge of the tale comes not in a palace or a temple but in a ruined object on the path: the great trunk of an oak-tree, huge and hollow, half-buried and crumbling. Osseo’s response is visceral—a cry of anguish—and then he vanishes into the yawning cavern. What emerges is the story’s first shocking reversal: At one end went in an old man, and from the other came a young man. The oak functions like a natural underworld: a passage through decay into radiance. And it happens in front of the mockers, as if the world itself is correcting their laughter.

But the correction is not clean. Oweenee is strangely changed too, into the very figure the crowd despises. This is where the poem’s ethics sharpen: Osseo, now handsome, could “fix” the mismatch by abandoning the newly ugly wife. Instead, he does the harder, quieter thing—he took her hand, compares it to an oak-leaf…in Winter, calls her sweetheart, and walks with slower step. The poem makes tenderness measurable: not by passion, but by pacing, touch, and willingness to be seen with the shamed person.

The wigwam rising: reward, punishment, and the danger of enchantment

At the feast, Osseo sits bewildered, looking first at Oweenee, then upward, and a voice from the starry distance speaks like a private channel of meaning: what Osseo hears as words is only music to the others, like a far-off whippoorwill. That difference matters. It suggests that the sacred isn’t democratically audible; it comes to the one who has been broken open by suffering and fidelity. The transformation of objects—wooden dishes into shells of scarlet, earthen kettles into bowls of silver, roof-poles into glittering rods—is dazzling, but it’s also a trap for the complacent. The people who valued shine and status are made into what they already were in spirit: display.

The sisters and husbands become birds of various plumage, preening and strutted, their punishment matching their social behavior. Yet Longfellow doesn’t make it purely vindictive; there’s a sly comedy in jays and magpies—creatures associated with noise and mimicry—becoming the embodied echo of their unseemly laughter. The turn back to Oweenee’s beauty only comes when Osseo repeats the same cry of anguish he uttered at the oak. In other words, her restoration is not earned by spectacle but by his pain: his love insists on her full humanity against the crowd’s flattening gaze.

A challenging question: is the father’s “justice” actually mercy?

The Star of Evening’s ruler claims he acted because the mockers could not see your heart, while Oweenee saw your naked heart and loved you. But the punishment is severe and lasting: the birds are caged, hung at the doorway as a kind of moral exhibit. The poem makes us ask whether turning people into objects of lesson—into a hanging cage—repeats the original sin in a higher register. If ridicule is a failure of recognition, is magical punishment another failure, just with cosmic authority?

The fatal arrow and the story’s final reversal

The narrative’s darkest irony arrives when Osseo, to amuse his son, opened the great cage and lets the transformed relatives fly so the boy can shoot at them. What has been framed as justice becomes a game; the lesson becomes sport. When the boy’s swift and fatal arrow strikes, the victim is suddenly a beautiful young woman with the arrow in her bosom. The poem yanks the reader from mythic sparkle into bodily harm. And that blood, falling on the sacred Star of Evening, breaks the enchantment, undoing the very moral machinery that held the story together.

Then comes another astonishing descent: the youth is pulled down by unseen hands to an island in the Big-Sea-Water; the lodge sinks after him; the birds fall like…leaves of Autumn. The ending doesn’t restore a neat order. The mockers become Little People, diminished—still alive, still social, dancing hand in hand on summer nights. The poem’s justice is not extermination but reduction: the jester’s punishment is to become a small, half-hidden myth on the edge of human sight.

Back at the wedding: laughter that suddenly hears itself

Iagoo closes with an explicit warning about great men who are misunderstood, and the fate of jesters. Yet Longfellow adds a final, brilliant discomfort: the listeners laughed and applauding and whisper, Does he mean himself, are we the aunts and uncles? The moral lands, but it lands into laughter—the very sound the tale condemns. That circularity is the poem’s last tension: even when a story teaches empathy, the crowd may convert it into entertainment. The canto ends with Chibiabos’s lament—O my sweetheart, my Algonquin!—a softer counter-spell that tries to re-center feeling over spectacle. After all the glittering bowls and silver cages, the simplest ache—remembering the moment of parting, the snow-white wampum at the neck—brings the poem back to what it has been insisting all along: love is not what dazzles; it is what stays true when the light changes.