The Song Of Hiawatha 22 Hiawathas Departure - Analysis

A farewell staged as a sunrise

This episode frames Hiawatha’s departure as an almost cosmic handoff: the world begins in glittering morning abundance, receives the Black-Robe missionary and his message, and ends with Hiawatha sailing into a burning sunset. The poem’s central claim feels double-edged: it presents the strangers’ arrival as a destined blessing, yet it also stages Hiawatha’s exit as the irreversible cost of that blessing. The landscape keeps saying Farewell because something more than a man is leaving; a whole way of belonging to place is being replaced by a new spiritual and cultural authority.

Longfellow makes this feel natural and foreordained by bathing the opening in clarity: freshness in the air, earth bright and joyous, bees passing in golden swarms, and a lake so still that every treetop has a shadow motionless beneath it. The calm is not just pretty scenery; it is the poem’s promise that what happens next fits into a larger harmony.

Hiawatha’s face as a prophecy-screen

Before anyone arrives, Hiawatha is already in the posture of reception. His sorrow has vanished as the fog lifts, and his expression is described as someone who sees what is to be. The gesture toward the sun—hands lifted, palms spread, light falling between the parted fingers—turns his body into a kind of filter or lens. He is literally flecked with light like an oak tree, as if nature itself is preparing him to interpret an incoming sign.

That prepares the reader for a key tension: Hiawatha seems most powerful at the moment he is about to be rendered unnecessary. His joy and triumph are real, but they also read as the confidence of someone stepping aside because he believes the future has already been shown to him.

The canoe that replaces the birds

The approach across the water begins as a guessing game among familiar beings—goose, diver, pelican, heron—creatures that belong to the same ecological and mythic world as Gitche Gumee. But the hovering shape is neither of these: it is a birch canoe with paddles carrying people from the distant land of Wabun. The poem makes contact feel like a continuation of nature (something floating, flying in mist), yet the substitution is the point: where the mind reaches for birds, history arrives in human form.

When the Black-Robe lands with the cross upon his bosom, the poem quietly shifts its center of gravity. The cross is not presented as threat; it is presented as a visible emblem of meaning. Still, it is an emblem that does not rise out of this shoreline’s own vocabulary, and the poem’s earlier calm reflection—trees mirrored perfectly in water—now feels like an image of a world about to be mirrored back in a different, governing story.

Hospitality that sounds like enchantment

Hiawatha’s welcome speech is so exuberant it becomes almost magical thinking. He claims the earth has never bloomed so gaily, the sun has never shone so brightly, and even the lake has become free from rocks because the strangers’ canoe has removed the hazards. This is hospitality turned into cosmology: the visitors’ mere presence seems to reorganize nature into smooth passage. It’s a gorgeous moment, but it also exposes a vulnerability—Hiawatha is interpreting arrival as pure benefit before he knows what it will require.

The Black-Robe answers with a different kind of blessing: Peace be with you, then Peace of Christ and joy of Mary. The stammering—words yet unfamiliar—underscores that this peace arrives in a language still being fitted to the mouth. Even in welcome, the poem stages translation as the beginning of transformation.

Two circles of authority in one doorway

The wigwam becomes the meeting place of two systems of sacred power. Hiawatha hosts generously—skins of bison and ermine, food in basswood bowls, the calumet filled and lighted—while the village’s own spiritual figures arrive too: Jossakeeds, Wabenos, Medicine-men. The scene keeps calling the visitors brothers, but the presence of named religious specialists on both sides hints at a quiet competition over who gets to define truth.

When the Black-Robe tells the Christian story—Mary, the Saviour who fasted and was crucified, then rose and ascended—the poem gives it a full, solemn arc. The chiefs respond politely: We will think. Yet the phrase the tribe accursed drops a harsh judgment into an otherwise courteous exchange, reminding us that this imported narrative carries its own built-in enemies and exclusions.

The nap that feels like a spell

After the message, the afternoon grows heavy with heat and silence, and everyone—especially the guests—falls into sleep: the forest whispers with a drowsy sound, the water ripples with a sound of sleep. This lull reads like more than weather. It is as if the world itself is holding its breath while the transfer of responsibility occurs offstage, quietly, without debate.

In that hush Hiawatha rises and speaks in whispers, careful not to wake the Black-Robe. He entrusts the strangers to Nokomis—watch and ward, no harm, no suspicion—and then tells his people to Listen to the visitors’ wisdom because the Master of Life has sent them. The contradiction is stark: Hiawatha is the one doing the persuading, effectively endorsing the new authority even as he removes himself from the community that trusts him most.

A sharp question the poem refuses to answer

If the strangers truly bring only peace, why must Hiawatha leave at all—why must the beloved leader sail to the portals of the Sunset the very day the cross arrives on the shore? The poem’s logic implies that the people cannot hold both presences at once: the Black-Robe’s message needs space, and that space is made by absence.

Westward into splendor, and into loss

The final movement makes departure feel like apotheosis. Hiawatha launches his birch canoe and whispers Westward! westward!, and the setting sun lays a long track of splendor on the water like a road. He sails into fiery sunset, then purple vapors, until the canoe sinks like a new moon disappearing. The imagery is tender and mythic—he is going to Ponemah, the Land of the Hereafter—but it is also final in a way the earlier welcomes were not.

Most telling is who speaks the last goodbye. Not just the people, but the whole environment: forests Sighed, waves Sobbed, and the heron Screamed Farewell. Nature becomes a choir of grief, suggesting that Hiawatha’s bond with this place was not merely political or personal; it was ecological, woven into water and treeline. The poem closes by calling him the Beloved, yet it stages belovedness as something that can be commemorated even as it vanishes—glorious in color, absolute in consequence.