Song of Hiawatha Man and the Natural World Quotes

Longfellow specifically addresses his poem to readers who love nature and all of its beauty. This technique allows him to put the reader in a more receptive mood before moving forward with the plot. And Longfellow needed all the help he could get, since critics of his time accused him of celebrating barbarians and primitive ways of life.

We might think of Native Americans as people who connect with nature in deep and spiritual ways. But scenes like this one show us that the relationship is actually more complex than that. In our first glimpse of human-nature conflict, Mudjekeewis brutally taunts a bear before crushing its skull with a club. How's that for an intimate connection?

A young man named Kabibonokka inherits the North-Wind from his father and uses it in all the ways you might expect. Without doubt, winter is the deadliest of all seasons for someone trying to live in North America. Longfellow does an especially great job of conveying this danger when he talks about the cold winter wind "hissing" through the forest.

Hiawatha spends his youngest years wandering through the forest and learning the secrets of nature. He does this not by conquering, but by listening. It's a good reminder that force isn't always the best way to connect with something.

Hiawatha constantly asks the natural world for help. When he builds a canoe, he asks the trees to give him resin and sap to help him plug all the holes in the bark. Many modern folks might just hack at the trees and take what they want, but Hiawatha shows respect in everything he does.

Mishe-Nahma's death might be one of the most powerful scenes in this whole book. Longfellow is especially eerie about the aftermath of the death, where dozens of seagulls come to eat the fish's oily flesh and strip his corpse until there's nothing left but his rack of bones. Ew.