The Song Of Hiawatha 15 Hiawathas Lamentation - Analysis

Grief as a cosmic disturbance

This canto’s central claim is that the death of a singer is not only personal loss but a tear in the world’s order, and that healing requires turning that rupture into a new responsibility. Longfellow makes Hiawatha’s mourning so loud it becomes weather and wildlife: his wail of anguish makes the bison paused, the wolves howled, and even distant thunder answers with the strange, onomatopoetic Baim-wawa! The tone here is deliberately oversized—mythic rather than private—so that grief feels like a force that changes the environment, not just the mourner.

That largeness also hints at a danger: sorrow can become a kind of power that swallows everything. Hiawatha paints his face black, covers his head with his robe, and sits Seven long weeks in a wigwam, repeating one fact—He is dead—as if repetition could make the truth manageable. But the poem suggests the opposite: repetition can become a trap.

The jealousy that targets music

The story starts with motive, and it’s revealing: the Evil Spirits fear Hiawatha’s wisdom, but they are also jealous of his love for Chibiabos and their faithful friendship. The threat isn’t merely physical; it’s directed at a bond that produces noble words and actions. Chibiabos is not just a friend but a specific kind of presence: he is later called the sweet musician and the sweetest of all singers. What gets attacked is the capacity to make meaning through song—to keep communal feeling alive.

That is why the warning scene matters. Hiawatha’s plea—do not leave me—is not possessive so much as accurate about the world’s malice. Chibiabos answers sweet and childlike, shaking his coal-black tresses, convinced that Harm and evil come not near me! The tension is sharp: innocence reads itself as invulnerable, while wisdom knows that innocence is often what mischief preys on.

Winter hunting and the treacherous surface

The poem makes the betrayal of safety feel physical. In the winter scene, Peboan roofs the water with ice, snowflakes hiss among withered oak-leaves, and pine-trees become wigwams; the world looks sheltered, even home-like. Yet that shelter is only a surface. Chibiabos, Armed with arrows and shod with snow-shoes, follows the deer O'er the treacherous ice, carried by the rapture of the hunting. The diction makes exhilaration part of the vulnerability: speed and delight push him onto the very skin of the lake where ambush waits.

Then the Evil Spirits do what winter already implied: they Broke the treacherous ice and Dragged him downward. Even the naming of Unktahee, the water god, intensifies the sense that death here is both accident and decree—an elemental swallowing. Chibiabos is Buried in the sand at the bottom of Gitche Gumee, as if the lake becomes a grave that doesn’t look like a grave from above. The contradiction is brutal: the world can appear solid and still be designed to give way.

Nature repeats the name, but cannot restore the person

After the death, the poem builds a chorus of mourning that is beautiful and useless at the same time. Fir-trees wave dark green fans and purple cones, Sighing with him; spring comes and the forest Looked in vain. Birds turn the name into a refrain—the bluebird Owaissa and the robin Opechee both sing Chibiabos! followed by the verdict He is dead. Even the whippoorwill wailing carries the news through the night.

The tone here is elegiac but also slightly claustrophobic: everywhere Hiawatha goes, the world gives him back the same sentence. The poem’s insistence on sweet musician and sweetest singer underscores the ache: what is lost is not only a man but a quality the world loved hearing. Yet this natural chorus cannot change anything; it can only echo. Grief is communalized, but it is not cured.

The hinge: from raw lament to ritual interruption

The canto turns when the Medicine-men arrive. Their entrance is almost procedural—silent, grave procession, pouches of healing made from beaver, lynx, or otter, filled with magic roots and simples. Crucially, Hiawatha’s behavior changes not because he feels better but because the ritual interrupts him. When he hears their steps, he ceased lamenting; he asks nothing, answers nothing, and slowly washes away the mourning colors. The poem treats ritual as a kind of external scaffolding: when the mind cannot move, the community moves it.

The chant itself is full of swaggering claims—I myself, myself!—and images of power: the great Gray Eagle, the loud-speaking thunder, unseen hands that shake the lodge. The tone shifts from sorrow to theatrical intimidation, as if the healers must outshout despair. And when Hiawatha upstarts wild and haggard, Like a man from dreams awakened, the poem describes recovery as clearing weather: clouds swept from heaven, ice swept from rivers. The implication is pointed: grief is natural, but it can also become a climate that needs changing.

A restoration that becomes a reassignment

The most emotionally tricky move comes next: the Medicine-men summoned Chibiabos from the sands beneath the water, and he rises, hears the music and the singing, and comes to the wigwam doorway—only to be refused entry. The poem allows reunion and denies it in the same breath. That contradiction is the canto’s moral spine: healing does not mean undoing death. The community can call the dead near, can speak to them, can even see them, but it cannot return the world to its earlier arrangement.

Instead, Chibiabos is given a task: a coal through a chink, a burning fire-brand through the door, and a title—Ruler in the Land of Spirits. The loss is transfigured into guidance for others: he must kindle campfires for those traveling to Ponemah, the Hereafter, on their solitary journey. This is where the poem’s idea of music deepens. Chibiabos is called the Master of all music’s nearer companion, and then he literally becomes a keeper of warmth and orientation in darkness. Song turns into shelter.

The dead man’s journey and the living’s burden

Chibiabos’s departure is rendered with ghostly delicacy: he vanishes Like a smoke-wreath; branches do not move, grasses do not bend, leaves make no sound under his footstep. The poem imagines death as a kind of frictionless passage, and then complicates it with a startling complaint from weary spirits carrying heavy loads—war-clubs, pots and kettles, food gifts. Their protest—Better were it to go naked—is almost bluntly practical.

That complaint presses on the living’s sentimental habits. The living try to help the dead by packing them with things, but the dead experience it as weight. The poem suggests a final tension: love can burden as easily as it can bless, especially when love refuses to accept what a journey actually requires.

What Hiawatha does with the loss

The canto closes not with a restored duet but with a new vocation. Hiawatha goes out Teaching men the use of simples, antidotes, and cures, making known the mystery of Medamin. The death of the musician produces, indirectly, a culture of healing: private sorrow becomes shared knowledge. The poem’s last movement is therefore not consolation in the sense of forgetting, but consolation as redirection—grief turned into medicine, and a beloved singer turned into a fire that helps others find their way.