A lot was hard to understand but I give it 5 stars considering the time it was written in. Plus I have the illustrated version which I think made it 10x better.

Longfellow might be the most steady author in the American canon I know of. He doesn’t wow you with spectacle, but with still clarity his poems amaze you with their depth, and display a craft honed to elegance. Longfellow in my mind is less of a painter and more of just a damn good housewright. The structure of his works is unmatched, and the product is really a sight to behold, but after all he’s not building Gothic cathedrals—he’s building New England Colonial style homes.

This tale is just a plain good romance. Longfellow has clearly done his due diligence, since from this I can clearly hear echoes of other romances I’ve read, and in a very authentic way. The Squire of Low Degree, King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Tristram and Isolde, and Lancelot and Elaine are all hiding in this poem.

His poetry doesn’t quite soar to the same heights it does in Evangeline (also written in an agile dactylic hexameter which calls Homer to mind), but at its best it resembles the work of the man who wrote The Village Blacksmith and Sunrise on the Hills more so than of the man who wrote Snow-Flakes or Excelsior. The score is 3.5/5 rounded up.

Pre-review: That was definitely a poem someone wrote.

I'm sure there is a lot of context I don't have because that was very silly.

hehehe

I'm not really one for poetry, but I truly enjoyed that read. I couldn't find the poem in a book at the library, so I just read it online since it's now public domain. :)

Priscilla is an interesting character. Although written by a male, Victorian author, and set in the Puritan Plymouth Bay Colony, she seems to me to be the one in control.

I was vaguely familiar with this story thanks to my mother and an episode of Wishbone back in the day, but I'm glad I finally read it in its entirety. I enjoyed reading it aloud on a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon and was quite impressed with some of Longfellow's insights into the female mind. 3 stars for its predictability and historical inaccuracies, but I love the verse.