poem

A Psalm of Life — Jun 28, 2026

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

0 votes
◆

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.

◆

Comments

  1. Loading comments…
📖 About this poem

Longfellow wrote this as a rallying cry against despair, framed as a young man talking back to the gloomy wisdom of old psalms. The argument is simple and bracing: stop treating life as a shadow or a countdown to the grave, and start treating it as a field of action. The music does a lot of the persuading — brisk trochaic rhythm, tight quatrains, lines that land like footsteps, which suits a poem urging you to get moving. Two images stick: hearts beating like "muffled drums" on the way to burial, and the famous "footprints on the sands of time," left not for glory but so some future struggling stranger might take courage from them. It still lands because the message dodges cynicism without denying hardship — it just insists effort and kindness outlast us, however brief the walk.

⚠ Sandbox · not production