The Song Of Hiawatha 16 Pau Puk Keewis - Analysis

A portrait of charm turning predatory

This episode frames Pau-Puk-Keewis as a kind of social weather: entertaining at first, then suddenly destructive. He is introduced not simply as a troublemaker but as the Storm-Fool, a figure whose energy arrives like a squall and leaves a mess behind. The poem’s central claim feels like this: mischief is not harmless when it feeds on other people’s bonds, property, and sacred spaces. Longfellow lets Pau-Puk-Keewis begin in spectacle and end in open contempt, tracing how a community’s appetite for amusement can become the doorway for violation.

From wedding dance to drifting dunes: mischief as a force of nature

Pau-Puk-Keewis is tied to physical disturbance from the start. We’re told his frenzy Whirled these drifting sands together on the dunes of Nagow Wudjoo, as if his personality literally rearranges the landscape. That detail also reaches back to his performance at Hiawatha’s wedding, where he Danced … merrily and madly to please the guests. The poem makes a sly connection: the same impulse that can delight a crowd can also scour and reshape the ground beneath their feet. Even the setting—Gitche Gumee’s shining water and dunes—suggests surfaces that are easily changed, easily unsettled, which matches a man always in search of new adventures.

He can’t stand stories unless he controls them

The first clear emotional cue is irritation. He bursts into Iagoo’s lodge and announces, I am tired of all this talking, tired of Iagoo’s stories and even Hiawatha’s wisdom. What he rejects isn’t just boredom; it’s a world where meaning is made by elders, by tradition, by patient listening. Iagoo’s tale about Ojeeg cracking the sky is communal myth-making—everyone gathered, receiving a shared explanation for the summer-weather. Pau-Puk-Keewis wants something Better than this endless talking: an amusement that produces winners and losers, that puts him at the center, that turns attention into possession.

So the poem sets up a quiet contest of authority. Iagoo speaks; Pau-Puk-Keewis interrupts. Iagoo transmits culture; Pau-Puk-Keewis introduces hazard. The tension here is between story as inheritance and game as extraction.

The bowl game: a lesson in domination disguised as entertainment

The game of Bowl and Counters arrives with ritual precision—wolf-skin pouch, painted pieces, named figures: great serpents, wedge-men, a war-club, a slender fish, and brass Ozawabeeks that flip between bright and black. The inventory is almost mesmerizing, and that’s the point: it looks like harmless play, even like art. But as soon as he starts exclaiming and explaining—tallying Thirteen tens and eight, then Five tens and an eight—the language becomes feverish and hypnotic, as if numbers could replace judgment.

What follows exposes the game’s real function: they gamble not for fun but for substance—dresses, weapons, wampum—until Pau-Puk-Keewis has despoiled them. The poem’s tone darkens through the crowd’s gaze: earlier, curious eyes stared; later, Twenty eyes glared Like the eyes of wolves. That wolf-image matters because it reverses the usual moral: the group looks feral, but the predator is the charming man walking away with their winter wealth.

Iagoo’s fury and the rigged loneliness of the winner

The wager for a Meshinauwa makes the cruelty explicit. Pau-Puk-Keewis claims he is lonely, that he have need of a companion, then proposes to stake his winnings against the young man Face-in-a-Mist, Iagoo’s sixteen-year-old nephew. It’s an ugly bargain hidden in festive language: a human attendant treated like a prize. The poem sharpens Iagoo’s presence through a striking ember image: As the fire burns in a pipe-head, so the old man’s eyes glow under shaggy eyebrows. Rage is smoldering, contained—exactly the opposite of Pau-Puk-Keewis’s airy, laughing motion.

When they throw the pieces, the symbolism becomes almost theatrical. Iagoo’s cast yields Only five. Pau-Puk-Keewis tosses lightly, and one wedge-man stands upright among the others, a visual echo of how he Stood alone among the players. His triumph—Five tens! mine the game is—is less about luck than about the poem’s sense that he thrives in systems where other people’s desire to win makes them surrender their agency. Even his exit is staged: the stripling carries the pile of goods as if bearing tribute.

Morning birdsong against gambling smoke: nature as ironic chorus

One of the poem’s most pointed turns comes when he steps outside: Hot and red with smoke and gambling / Were the eyes of Pau-Puk-Keewis, and then he enters the freshness of a pleasant Summer morning. Birds sing; streamlets run; his heart sings too. The world is innocent, but he isn’t purified by it—he uses it as soundtrack. The mismatch is the moral weather report: a bright morning doesn’t redeem a dark act; it can simply make the darkness feel more entitled, more buoyant.

Desecrating Hiawatha’s lodge: prank becomes sacrilege

The clearest line he crosses is at Hiawatha’s home. The lodge is Silent and deserted, and the raven king, Kahgahgee, sits with fiery eyes, screaming and flapping. Pau-Puk-Keewis reads the emptiness as opportunity: the lodge is left unguarded! Then he commits an act that is both petty and profound: he seizes the raven, whirls it like a rattle, and strangles it, leaving the body hanging as an insult and a taunt. This is not random violence; it’s message-making. He turns a living sentinel into a sign of contempt.

Inside, he throws the household into wild disorder—bowls of wood, earthen kettles, Robes of buffalo, Skins of otter—and the poem insists on the target: an insult to Nokomis, a taunt to Minnehaha. That naming matters. He isn’t merely vandalizing objects; he’s attacking a family’s dignity, the domestic center that holds the community together. The earlier gambling stole property; this invasion tries to steal respect.

The headland slaughter: mischief revealed as appetite

After whistling and singing through the forest—so light he seems almost blessed by squirrels and birds—he climbs the headlands and waits, full of mirth and mischief, for Hiawatha’s return. The scenery turns dreamlike: waters splashed below, heavens swam above. In that suspended, floating world, Pau-Puk-Keewis lies on his back and kills the mountain chickens as they wheel near him, by tens and twenties, throwing their bodies down to the beach. The violence here is chilling because it’s casual, almost recreational—killing as a pastime while waiting for a confrontation.

The sea-gull Kayoshk’s cry—He is slaying us by hundreds!—turns individual mischief into communal emergency. The birds become a society with a messenger, a brother who must be warned. Nature itself begins to organize against him, as if the poem is widening the circle of those harmed by his pleasure.

A sharp question the episode leaves behind

When Pau-Puk-Keewis says he is lonely and wants a companion, is the poem hinting that his cruelty is a kind of failed hunger for belonging—one he can only express by winning, taking, and humiliating? Or is that loneliness just another trick, a performance as calculated as the painted counters?

What the poem ultimately condemns

The episode doesn’t deny that Pau-Puk-Keewis is dazzling; it shows exactly how dazzlingness becomes dangerous. He moves from dance to dice, from storytelling circles to the stripping of goods, from playful whistling to strangling a raven and wrecking a home. The steady escalation argues that the real threat isn’t mere rule-breaking; it’s the impulse to treat everything—wampum, a boy, a household, living birds—as pieces in a game he expects to win.