Comparing Poems

In two of Longfellow’s poems, “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls” and “The Cross of Snow”, he discusses the concept of death. However, the tone and attitude of each poem is drastically different. This might be caused by the difference in feeling and intension when he wrote the two poems. “The Cross of Snow” is a poem that Longfellow kept private and never intended for it to be published. He wrote the poem to express his grief towards the death of his wife. This poem seemed to be more touching because more emotion is involved when Longfellow wrote it. There is a specific person mentioned in the poem: Longfellow’s dead wife, Fanny Appleton. In the poem, Longfellow expressed his unbroken love for his wife, even after eighteen year of her death. The other poem, “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls”, is a much more neutral poem. In it, Longfellow portrayed death as something natural. Just as the tide rises and the tide falls, people live and people die. Human life is just like the journey of a traveler. Once we are gone, our traces are washed off, and we never come back. No specific person is mentioned in the poem. This implies that the traveler can be anyone or even everyone. This made the poem more universal.