The Song Of Hiawatha 13 Blessing The Cornfields - Analysis

Peace is announced like a spell

The poem’s central claim is that plenty doesn’t arrive by accident: it is made through collective labor, ritual protection, and, when necessary, hard enforcement. Longfellow opens by ordering us to Sing—not to argue or explain—so the scene enters like a chant. Peace is not just described but repeatedly buried: Buried was the bloody hatchet, Buried was the dreadful war-club, until even the war-cry was forgotten. The tone here is bright and relieved, yet also slightly forceful, as if harmony needs constant re-declaring. That repeated burying hints at a tension that will matter later: violence is not erased, only put underground.

Mondamin: abundance as a buried body

The corn is treated as a person—Mondamin—so farming becomes a kind of ongoing relationship with a living sacrifice. The maize-fields waved their green plumes and soft and sunny tresses, filling the village with visible wealth. But the same language insists the corn’s life is rooted in burial: the women Buried in the earth Mondamin, and later Stripped the garments from him at harvest. The poem admires this cycle without flinching from its bodily implication: to eat is to take, and to take is to unmake something that had been made beautiful.

Minnehaha’s night walk: protection through vulnerability

The hinge of the episode is Hiawatha’s instruction to Minnehaha to bless the fields by walking their border Lay aside your garments wholly, Covered by your tresses only. The tone shifts into hushed, ceremonial darkness—when all is silence, when Nepahwin Shuts the doors of the wigwams. The ritual’s logic is striking: the protection comes from footprints, from the body’s contact with the ground, from the woman who planted and will harvest. Yet the poem insists on privacy and consent: she is Unashamed and unaffrighted, and the darkness, Guskewau, becomes a guardian so that none might boast he saw her. The contradiction is sharp and purposeful: the community’s survival depends on an act that must remain unseen, a sacred intimacy between person, field, and night.

Mocking laughter meets real punishment

The crows and ravens, led by Kahgahgee, introduce a second kind of laughter—derisive and predatory. They jeer, Hear the Wise Man, and their melancholy laughter shakes the treetops, as if skepticism itself is a force of nature. Hiawatha answers not with more magic but with traps: he spreads Snares, lies in ambush, and then moves among them Striding terrible. The sudden brutality—bodies hung on poles for scarecrows—darkens the earlier peace. This is the poem’s hardest turn: the cornfields are called consecrated, but they are guarded by a warning display. Plenty, the poem implies, is not simply a gift; it is defended territory.

A hard question the poem refuses to soften

If the magic circle of footprints can stop blight and mildew, why does the poem still require a massacre and a hostage? One answer is that the threats are different: insects and weather are impersonal, but hunger and raid are choices. The poem quietly argues that ritual can bless a world, but it cannot negotiate with a will.

Harvest laughter: community joy with a shadow overhead

After violence, the poem returns to festivity: the maize ripens into garments green and yellow, and the village gathers for husking under fragrant pine-trees. The soundscape becomes communal—young people laughing and singing like magpies, blue-jays, robins—while the old men sit in uninterrupted silence, responding only Ugh! This split is another tension: youth turns harvest into flirtation (the red ear red as blood promises a sweetheart), while age receives it with restrained approval. Even the earlier menace is not fully gone; Kahgahgee screamed and quivered from the wigwam, and the black marauders answer from treetops. The closing mood is therefore layered: laughter wins the field for the moment, but the poem keeps reminding us that abundance is always bordered—by forest, by hunger, by memory, and by whatever was only ever “buried.”