The Song Of Hiawatha 20 The Famine - Analysis

Winter as an Enemy That Keeps Advancing

This canto’s central claim is brutal and simple: when the world turns uniformly hostile, love becomes both the reason to fight and the place where the fight finally breaks you. The poem opens by making winter feel less like weather than like a conquering force. The repetition of thicker, thicker, thicker and deeper, deeper, deeper gives the sense of a siege tightening. Ice Froze the lake and river; snow doesn’t just fall, it drifted / Through the forest, round the village, pressing in on human space. Even movement becomes humiliatingly difficult: the hunter can Hardly force a passage from his buried wigwam, and his labor is explicitly Vainly spent. The forest turns ghastly and gleaming, a phrase that makes the brightness of snow feel like a glare rather than comfort.

That early section ends with a man who Fell, and could not rise, perishing from cold and hunger. It’s not only a death; it’s a warning: in this landscape, the body’s ordinary contract with the world—work hard, track game, return home—no longer holds. The poem’s tone here is incantatory and grim, insisting that winter doesn’t merely inconvenience life; it cancels its usual rules.

Hunger Becomes Cosmic: Wolves in the Stars

The famine is described as if it spreads beyond bellies into the elements themselves: Hungry was the air, Hungry was the sky, and even the hungry stars stare Like the eyes of wolves. That image matters because it makes hunger feel predatory, intelligent, and watchful. It isn’t a neutral shortage; it is something that looks back. The poem pushes the contradiction hard: the heavens, usually a place of guidance or mercy, become a pack’s gaze. The effect is to isolate the village spiritually as well as physically: there is no safe “above,” no impartial nature, no comforting distance.

Longfellow also pairs famine with fever—starvation with illness—so suffering has a double edge: the body is drained and then inflamed. The chorus of cries (Oh the famine and the fever! Oh the wailing of the children!) widens the grief beyond the couple at the center. Yet the poem is careful: the communal catastrophe is about to enter one particular home, and once it does, the epic scale will be felt as intimate pain.

Two Silent Guests Sit Down in the Seat of Love

The hinge of the canto comes when Famine and Fever arrive not as abstract conditions but as visitors who violate human etiquette. They Waited not to be invited, Did not parley at the doorway, and sit without word of welcome directly In the seat of Laughing Water. That detail is cruelly precise: the forces destroying the household take the literal place that belongs to Minnehaha, as if the poem is saying that catastrophe doesn’t merely surround love; it displaces it.

When they announce themselves—I am Famine, Bukadawin! and I am Fever, Ahkosewin!—the naming feels like a spell. Minnehaha’s response is bodily and wordless: she Shuddered, Lay down, Hid her face, and becomes a paradox of sensations, trembling, freezing, burning. The contradiction inside that phrase captures fever in a famine winter: she is cold to the bone and on fire. It also captures her helplessness; the guests speak, and her body answers.

Hiawatha’s Prayer Meets Only His Own Echo

Hiawatha’s reaction is to turn action into prayer and prayer into action. He goes Forth into the empty forest with deadly sorrow in his heart and a stony firmness on his face, and even his anguish betrays him physically: sweat froze and fell not, as if the world refuses to allow even the normal release of grief. He arms himself—mighty bow of ash-tree, quiver full of arrows, snow-shoes—and appeals upward: Gitche Manito, the Mighty! He asks not for victory but for food: Give your children food, and specifically, Give me food for Minnehaha.

The poem’s bleakest spiritual moment arrives in the answer: none comes except echo. His cry rings Through the forest vast and vacant, but returns only as the echo of his crying, repeating Minnehaha! Minnehaha! The echo is both sound effect and verdict: the universe gives him back his love’s name, not her life. That is the canto’s key tension—Hiawatha’s belief in a listening power versus a world that behaves like a canyon, reflecting sound without offering help.

Summer Memory Makes the Present More Unbearable

As he roams, the poem splices in a remembered summer when the birds sang, streamlets laughed, and the air was full of fragrance. The point isn’t to decorate the winter scene; it’s to sharpen it. In that earlier season, Minnehaha’s voice did not tremble as she said, I will follow you, my husband! Now Hiawatha is the one following—chasing a way to keep her alive—and the world answers with emptiness. The memory exposes how quickly the poem’s title-name, Laughing Water, has become irony: laughter has been replaced by the hush of snow and the stare of stars.

Minnehaha’s Visions: A Call That Crosses Miles

Back in the wigwam, Minnehaha begins to hear and see what the living around her cannot confirm. She hears a roaring and a rushing and believes the Falls of Minnehaha are Calling—her own name transformed into a threshold. Nokomis answers with practical explanations—the night-wind, then the smoke—trying to keep the visions in the realm of weather and household. But Minnehaha’s perception keeps moving toward death: she sees her father Beckoning, then feels the icy fingers of Pauguk, whose eyes Glare in the darkness.

Her cry, Hiawatha! Hiawatha!, is the poem’s emotional wire stretched taut across distance. Hiawatha, Miles away, hears it anyway. Whether we take this literally or as a poetic way of describing intuition, the effect is the same: love becomes a kind of haunting. The same device that once joined them—calling, following—now becomes a summons to arrive too late.

The Death Scene and the Seven-Day Silence

Hiawatha returns Empty-handed, heavy-hearted to a home filled with ritual wailing: Nokomis cries Wahonowin! and wishes she had died instead. When Hiawatha sees Minnehaha Lying dead and cold, his grief is described at a cosmic scale: his cry makes the forest moan and the stars Shook and trembled. The world that earlier looked at them like wolves now seems to recoil, but too late to save anyone.

Then the poem does something stark: it stops motion. Hiawatha sits still and speechless on her bed for Seven long days and nights, unconscious / Of the daylight or the darkness. This is mourning as paralysis, a refusal or inability to rejoin time. The contradiction here is painful: the man who begged for food and strode into the forest now cannot even lift his face from his hands. Action was his love-language; now love has no outlet but endurance.

Ermine, Snow, and the Fire That Must Not Go Out

Minnehaha’s burial folds beauty into desolation. They Clothed her in her richest garments, Wrapped her in her robes of ermine, and then Covered her with snow, like ermine. The simile makes the natural world imitate luxury, but with an awful twist: the same snow that starved her now becomes her shroud. The poem doesn’t let us forget that winter provides the materials of both suffering and ceremony.

The fire lit on her grave, kindled four times for her soul’s journey to the Islands of the Blessed, becomes Hiawatha’s last act of care. He watches so it might not be extinguished, so it will not leave her in the darkness. That vigilance is heartbreaking because it is finally a task he can complete: he couldn’t feed her, couldn’t outrun the guests, couldn’t make the god answer—but he can keep a flame alive. His farewell—All my heart is buried with you—doesn’t merely express grief; it states that his inner life now resides in the grave.

A Hard Question the Poem Leaves Burning

If the only answer to Hiawatha’s prayer is an echo saying Minnehaha, what is the poem asking us to trust: divine justice, human ritual, or the stubborn duty of keeping the fire lit anyway? The canto seems to suggest that meaning survives not as rescue, but as witness—Hiawatha at the doorway, refusing to let her journey be swallowed by cold darkness.