Tales Of A Wayside Inn Part 1 The Sicilians Tale King Robert Of Sicily - Analysis

The poem’s wager: can a king survive being un-kinged?

Longfellow turns political power into a spiritual test. The central claim of King Robert of Sicily is that authority without humility is a kind of sleepwalking: Robert “proudly sat” at vespers, hears the Magnificat’s warning—Deposuit potentes, the mighty cast down—and immediately treats it as harmless because it is “only” in Latin. His arrogance isn’t just a personal flaw; it is a refusal to imagine any order above his own. The tale’s fantasy premise (an Angel taking his place) is essentially a moral experiment: what happens when a man who believes There is no power meets a power he cannot command?

The tone at the start has a faintly amused sharpness—Robert yawns in church—yet the poem steadily tightens into something darker and more uncanny, until it finally clears into penitence and quiet prayer. That arc matters: Longfellow doesn’t simply punish pride; he shows pride being dismantled from the inside.

Latin as insulation: Robert hears the truth and calls it “seditious”

The first hinge is small but decisive: Robert asks a “learned clerk” what the chant means, is told plainly that God has put down the mighty and exalted the lowly, and responds not with fear or curiosity but with contempt. Calling the words seditious is revealing. He treats a sacred song as if it were political propaganda, because he assumes the highest reality is the throne. Even his comfort—priests singing in a language the people don’t understand—becomes part of his sin: Latin functions like insulation, letting him hear judgment without feeling it.

Then he leaning back… fell asleep. The sleep is literal, but it also feels like a symbol for complacency: he dozes off inside the very words that describe his coming reversal. The poem’s justice is not random; it grows directly out of the line he tried to shrug off.

The empty church and the laughing echo: power without an audience

When Robert wakes, the church is “empty,” lit only by a few faint lamps before “some saint.” This scene strips away the public theater that props up his identity. His first response is not self-examination but command: he threatens, complains, hurls “imprecations upon men and saints.” Yet the building answers him only with echo—sound bouncing off “roof and walls”—and Longfellow sharpens the humiliation by imagining it as mockery: As if dead priests were laughing. It’s a grim joke: Robert, who wanted the chant safely locked in ritual, is now locked inside the ritual space, hearing his own rage turned into meaningless noise.

The sexton’s reaction completes the reversal. To the servant, Robert is some drunken vagabond. In other words, the king’s “self” is not an essence the world automatically recognizes; it depends on signs—doors opening, titles believed, clothing respected. Once those vanish, his authority sounds like madness.

The Angel on the dais: the terrifying difference between resemblance and reality

The poem’s most charged image arrives in the banquet-room: another king wearing Robert’s “robes,” “crown,” and “signet-ring,” identical in “features” yet transfigured with angelic light. The tension here is almost theological: the Angel is both a perfect impersonator and the opposite of an impostor. Everyone fails to recognize him, even though his “divine effulgence” keeps “piercing the disguise.” That paradox suggests Longfellow’s point about spiritual perception: people can miss the sacred even when it is radiant, and they can accept a falsehood (Robert’s own self-myth) even when it is threadbare.

Robert’s reaction is crucial evidence of what he thinks kingship is. He doesn’t say, “What has happened to me?” He says, I am the King and calls the Angel a “usurper.” His identity is a property claim. It takes the Angel’s calm sentence—Nay, not the King—to redraw the map: Robert will be made court “Jester,” dressed in “bells and scalloped cape,” and given an “ape” as counselor. The punishment is tailored: he who would not bow before God must now bow before servants, henchmen, and ridicule.

Motley, straw, and the ape: humiliation as a long education

Longfellow refuses a quick moral fix. Robert wakes to “straw,” “bare, discolored walls,” and the “revolting” ape “shivering and chattering.” The line It was no dream lands hard because it cancels the usual escape hatch of pride: the belief that consequences aren’t real. Yet the deeper tension is that Robert remains “unsubdued.” Even as he eats What others left and is “mocked” and “laughed to scorn,” he keeps flinging back the same defiant refrain: I am, I am the King! In other words, the poem distinguishes between external abasement and internal conversion. He can be brought low without becoming humble.

Meanwhile, under the Angel’s “governance benign,” Sicily enters a kind of golden age: it “danced with corn and wine,” and even Enceladus in the volcano rests. This contrast stings. Robert’s rule, implied by his character, would have been noisy self-assertion; the Angel’s rule is quiet order. The island becomes a mirror showing what Robert’s kingship lacked: not splendor, but blessing.

A harder question: is the poem merciful, or does it break him to save the state?

The tale’s logic is unsettling: the people flourish most when the rightful king is removed, and Robert’s suffering becomes almost a public entertainment—he rides in “mock state” on a “piebald steed,” with “fox-tails” flapping, while townspeople make “huge merriment.” Longfellow makes us ask whether this is purely moral correction or also political necessity. If kingship must serve the common good, what happens when the king’s pride makes him unfit?

Holy Week and the inward turn: awe replaces insistence

The poem’s major spiritual turn comes not from further mockery but from sacred time. In Rome, Robert’s appeal to kinship—Do you not know me?—fails; even the Pope is “troubled” but silent, and the Emperor laughs. Robert learns that neither family nor institution can simply restore his status by recognition. Then Holy Week passes, and Easter morning brings a different kind of light: the Angel’s presence makes the city bright Before the sun rose, and people feel Christ indeed had risen. Even Robert, on his straw bed, sees “unwonted splendor” and kneels “humbly.” The image of the rushing garments of the Lord is important because it bypasses rank. Robert encounters something he cannot argue with or dominate. The poem suggests that humility is not achieved by self-hatred, but by awe.

The final exchange: from “I am the King” to “Thou knowest best”

Back in Palermo, the Angel asks again, Art thou the King? The repetition matters because it measures change. For years Robert answered with clenched pride; now he bows, crosses his hands on his breast, and says, Thou knowest best! His new language is penitential and concrete: “scarlet” sins, a “cloister,” “stones” paving “the way to heaven,” “Walk barefoot.” He no longer treats religion as decorative chant in a foreign tongue; he imagines it as a hard, bodily discipline.

Then Longfellow braids the beginning and end together. The monks chant again: He has put down the mighty, and through it rises the second melody: I am an Angel, and thou art the King! The resolution is not that Robert seizes power back, but that he receives it rightly—after consenting to be judged. The last image seals the transformation: courtiers find him not boasting on the throne but kneeling, “absorbed in silent prayer.” The poem’s final claim is quietly radical: the only kingship worth restoring is the one that can kneel.