Longfellow’s “A Day of Sunshine”: Finding Joy in Every Season

As fall approaches, the tendency is to think of leaves falling, bare branches, then snow, to imagine cooler days, cooler nights, creakiness and woe. The turning season is – for many poets and non-poets alike – the last chance to hunt, to fish, to cycle, and to hike. But some see in the birches’ turn to yellow, maples turn to red, a thousand happy things – waiting to be said.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of them. He loved all the seasons, spring, summer, fall and winter, youth and age, love and a long, hard-thinking gaze. Able to stir deep waters, he was born in Portland, Massachusetts, not even in Maine. Through trials and loss, poetry kept him sane.

Schooled at Bowdoin, Longfellow could quickly turn a line to rhyme. He was a realist and man of faith, amused by children, whimsy, all things divine. Among his happiest creations, A Day of Sunshine (1872).”

“O gift of God!  O perfect day:
Whereon shall no man work, but play;
Whereon it is enough for me,
Not to be doing, but to be!

Through every fiber of my brain,
Through every nerve, through every vein,
I feel the electric thrill, the touch
Of life, that seems almost too much.

I hear the wind among the trees
Playing celestial symphonies;
I see the branches downward bent,
Like keys of some great instrument.

And over me unrolls on high
The splendid scenery of the sky,
Where through a sapphire sea the sun
Sails like a golden galleon, 
Towards yonder cloud-land in the West,
Towards yonder Islands of the Blest,
Whose steep sierra far uplifts
Its craggy summits white with drifts.

Blow, winds! and waft through all the rooms
The snow-flakes of the cherry-blooms!
Blow, winds! and bend within my reach
The fiery blossoms of the peach!

O Life and Love! O happy throng
Of thoughts, whose only speech is song!
O heart of man! canst thou not be
Blithe as the air is, and as free?

So, as the leaves turn, and seasons with them; as days go from hot to warm to chill, remember there are blessings with each season, vigorous and still, poets worth reading, worth of the pen and quill.