The Song Of Hiawatha 2 The Four Winds - Analysis

A cosmos built out of very human stories

This section of The Song of Hiawatha turns the four winds into a family history, and its central claim is quietly unsettling: the forces that govern the world are not pure or impartial—they are born from swagger, loneliness, rivalry, and mistake. Longfellow frames the winds as offices handed out after a feat of conquest, but each wind’s origin reveals a different kind of power. The West-Wind is founded on theft and domination; the East-Wind on yearning that becomes possession; the North-Wind on cruelty that can be laughed out of the room; the South-Wind on desire so unfocused it can love a weed. By the end, the heavens feel less like a clean map and more like an extension of human temperament.

The West-Wind’s authority begins as a robbery in the dark

Mudjekeewis earns his coronation through an act that is both heroic and predatory. He steals the Belt of Wampum from Mishe-Mokwa while the bear lies asleep and cumbrous, a detail that makes the “victory” depend on stealth before it depends on strength. The poem lingers on proximity—hot breath warming Mudjekeewis’s hands, the bear’s round ears and small eyes that fail to notice—so the tension is tactile: triumph is achieved at the edge of being discovered. Only after the theft does Mudjekeewis swing the war-club and strike between the eyes, finishing with a second blow that breaks the skull as ice is broken. That simile prefigures the later winter episodes, but it also makes the killing feel practical, almost routine: the world’s “West-Wind” rule is grounded in a blunt, workmanlike violence.

Bravery, masculinity, and the poem’s ugliest taunt

The most revealing moment isn’t the kill; it’s Mudjekeewis’s speech over the wounded bear. He calls Mishe-Mokwa a coward for whimpering like a woman, and repeats the insult by comparing him to a cowardly old woman. The poem’s tone turns harshly derisive here, and the contradiction sharpens: the “brave” hero is the one who attacked a sleeping enemy, yet he performs honor by policing how pain is allowed to sound. The taunt tries to make the bear’s suffering into a social disgrace—disgrace your tribe—as if the real battle is not physical dominance but narrative dominance, the right to define what counts as courage. When the people shout Honor be and rename him Kabeyun, the poem shows how quickly a community can convert raw force into legitimacy.

Wabun: sunrise as romance, romance as transformation

After the brutal founding of the West-Wind, the poem softens into luminous lyricism with Wabun. He is described in painterly morning colors—silver arrows chasing darkness, cheeks streaked with crimson—and yet the key note is not radiance but isolation: Still his heart was sad because he is alone in heaven. The turn comes when he looks down through river fog like a ghost and sees a solitary girl among water-flags and rushes. Their bond is built on mirrored loneliness: She on earth and he in heaven. But the poem doesn’t let the romance remain mutual for long; it slides into assimilation. Wabun drew her to his bosom, folded her into his crimson robes, and finally changed her into a star. The tenderness is real, but so is the cost: the maiden’s human life is ended so Wabun can have an eternal companion. Morning becomes beautiful partly because it has swallowed someone.

Kabibonokka versus Shingebis: winter’s tyranny meets laughter

The North-Wind episode restores conflict, but with a different moral balance. Kabibonokka rules among icebergs and everlasting snow-drifts, and his seasonal power is undeniable: he froze the ponds and drove birds south. Yet the poem undermines him by giving him an opponent who refuses to grant winter its mystique. Shingebis stays behind with four great logs—one for each moon—and when Kabibonokka piles snow around the lodge and shouts down the smoke-flue, Shingebis responds by eating and singing, You are but my fellow-mortal. The tonal shift is crucial: the North-Wind enters as terror and exits as something almost absurd, sweating so hard that drops make dints upon the ashes, like spring thaw in miniature. Even the wrestling match on the frozen fens ends with Kabibonokka baffled, beaten, chased by gusty laughter. The tension here is between elemental dominance and psychological dominance: winter can freeze rivers, but it cannot freeze a mind that treats it as merely another being.

Shawondasee’s love story is a misreading of the world

The South-Wind, Shawondasee, is introduced as fat and lazy, living in never-ending Summer. His power is not conquest but diffusion: his pipe smoke fills the sky with haze and vapor, turning the north briefly tender with Indian Summer. But his one “shadow” is desire. He sees a tall and slender maiden on the prairie in brightest green, with hair like the sunshine, and he longs for her without moving—too fat and lazy to woo. When her “tresses” turn white, he blames his northern brother for stealing her, and his sighs drift across the prairie until the air looks full of thistle-down. Then the poem snaps into a chastening clarity: 'T was no woman, it was the prairie dandelion he has puffed away. The emotional force remains—he truly grieves—but it is revealed as attachment to an illusion. Unlike Wabun, who transforms a woman into a star, Shawondasee transforms a flower into a fantasy, and then destroys it by the very breath of longing.

The winds as a family argument about what power costs

By dividing the heavens among Mudjekeewis and his children, the poem doesn’t just explain the weather; it stages a debate about how the world gets governed. West is authority won by a violent story; East is beauty that solves loneliness by possession; North is cruelty that fails against warmth and mockery; South is softness that mistakes what it sees and mourns what it itself disperses. The final arrangement—sons stationed at the corners of the heavens—looks orderly, yet every origin tale leaves residue: shame, theft, sweat, vanished thistle-down. The cosmos works, but it is stitched together from flawed impulses that never fully disappear.

If the winds are “mortal,” what does that make their rule?

Shingebis’s refrain, my fellow-mortal, presses on the whole myth. If a wind can be defeated, mocked, or deluded—if it can sweat, pine, steal, or misrecognize—then the poem invites a troubling thought: the world’s most “natural” forces may be sustained by the same brittle vanities as human power. Mudjekeewis demands honor; Wabun solves sadness by turning a person into a sign; Shawondasee loves what he cannot name. The weather, in this telling, is not fate—it is temperament made vast.