Tales Of A Wayside Inn Part 2 Interlude 6 - Analysis

A room full of opinions, and no final verdict

This interlude is less about a single Legend than about the social weather that gathers around any story once it’s told: praise, quaribbling, and the hunger to be right. Longfellow sketches a little tribunal of listeners who can’t stop grading—Some liked the moral, others the verse, some thought it better or worse than earlier tales. The central claim the poem quietly makes is that community doesn’t naturally produce consensus; it produces competing certainties. The Theologian’s irritation—ill-concealed distress—marks a key tension: stories are meant to bind people together, but commentary can splinter them into factions of taste and doctrine.

The Theologian’s proverb: truth reduced to color-choice

The Theologian answers the bickering with a proverb that lands like a diagnosis: ask friends for guidance and one says it is white, others say it is red. The image is bluntly visual, almost childish—truth shrunk to a color argument—and that’s the point. Under the grave tone is a kind of weary comedy: even when people mean well, their advice multiplies options instead of clarifying them. The Spanish Jew’s Amen! is both agreement and punctuation: it closes debate not by resolving it, but by acknowledging that irresolution is normal.

From judgment to counting: the Pleiades and the need for seven

Then the poem pivots from evaluating one story to needing the next one. Six stories told! becomes a new anxiety—numerical, almost superstitious. The Sicilian wants seven, a cluster like the Pleiades, turning the evening’s storytelling into a little cosmos that ought to feel complete. But the metaphor immediately introduces lack: one is missing from our heaven. The mood shifts from argumentative to urgent, and the poem’s contradiction sharpens: they crave an ideal pattern (the star-cluster), yet their actual group has a hole in it—an absence that can’t be explained by taste or debate.

The landlord’s disappearance: a joke with real social stakes

The search is played for humor—he isn’t in the bar (where landlords most frequent), nor by the kitchen fire, nor anywhere up the stairs. Still, the missing host matters. A wayside inn promises shelter, warmth, continuity; a vanished landlord feels like the floor briefly giving way. The Sicilian’s comic overreach—given up the ghost—brings in another proverb: the dead / Can tell no tales. That line does double work: it’s a gag, but it also states the interlude’s blunt law. Storytelling depends on living presence; if the teller is absent, the community must either fall silent or reassign the role.

Flattery as fuel: making the Student speak

The solution is social pressure dressed as praise. The Sicilian decrees that one of you / Must tell a story, and he targets the Student—supposedly because he knows so many of the best and tells them better than the rest. The Student’s response reveals how easily identity can be nudged into performance: he’s happy as a child when dubbed a little man, and the flattery beguiled him into accepting the double task. The poem ends not with pure eagerness but with a small, telling compromise: the Student speaks because he is pleased to be seen a certain way. In this inn, stories don’t only entertain; they also distribute status, soothe awkward gaps, and keep the shared heaven from showing its missing star.

One uncomfortable question hiding under the jokes

If a group can’t bear a pause—if one is missing means someone must be pushed onstage—what happens to the stories that don’t fit the cluster? The interlude’s cheerfulness can’t quite conceal how quickly companionship turns into obligation: even in play, someone is always being chosen.