poem

A Psalm of Life — Jun 11, 2026

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN SAID TO THE PSALMIST.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,--act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;--

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

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📖 About this poem

Longfellow wrote this as a rallying cry against gloom, a young man's rebuttal to the old psalmist's claim that life is empty and fleeting. The rhythm does a lot of the persuading: short, trochaic lines that fall like footsteps or drumbeats, driving the argument forward the way a march drives an army. That "muffled drum" beating its funeral course toward the grave is the poem's darkest image, quickly answered by its brightest, footprints left in the sands of time, seen by some shipwrecked stranger who takes heart again. That single picture, one person's endurance becoming another's rescue, is why the poem still works. Strip away the Victorian capitalization and stern moralizing, and what remains is a plain, sturdy insistence that action matters, that today should outdo yesterday, and that showing up with courage is itself a kind of meaning. It reads like a pep talk because it is one.

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