The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls: Historical & Literary Context

The Fireside Poets

Literary historians often list Longfellow among a group of nineteenth-century writers from New England, collectively known as the “Fireside Poets.” These poets relied on conventional poetic forms to write verses on themes related to history, domestic life, and morality. From a twenty-first-century perspective, these poets often seem conservative, and the staunch traditionalism of their choices of form and theme went out of fashion long ago. However, the Fireside Poets enjoyed unprecedented popularity during their time. Schoolchildren memorized their poems for recitation, and families regularly gathered around the hearth in the evenings to read their verse aloud—hence the “fireside” reference in the name. In addition to Longfellow, who was the most popular of all, the Fireside Poets included William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Though these poets often emphasized traditional and nationalist values, some of them were also seen as American inheritors of the European Romantic traditions. Longfellow in particular adopted some key Romantic images. In “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls,” for instance, the depiction of a solitary individual against a dramatic natural backdrop recalls Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc” (1816) and Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818).

The Hero’s Journey

The bare-bones narrative structure of Longfellow’s poem bears an intriguing resemblance to a traditional narrative form known as “the hero’s journey.” Broadly speaking, the hero’s journey follows a specially gifted protagonist as they journey forth into the unknown world, then return home upon the completion of their quest. This circular narrative structure appears in stories from all around the world. Perhaps the most iconic example of the hero’s journey in the Western literary canon is Homer’s The Odyssey. This epic poem tells the story of Odysseus, an unusually clever man who, after fighting for ten years in the Greeks’ war against Troy, spends another ten years struggling to make his way home to Ithaca. In the case of Longfellow’s poem, the traditional hero’s journey is flipped on its head. Instead of a truly heroic figure, the mysterious traveler is completely devoid of distinguishing characteristics. Furthermore, instead of going on an epic quest that takes them far from home then back again, the traveler’s journey in the poem is much more banal. In Longfellow’s hands, the hero’s journey gets stripped of all heroism and figures the life of an average human as a decidedly non-epic journey from out of cosmic nothingness and back again.