Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Village Blacksmith"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2023

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Summary

"The spirit of the smithy is so close to the spirit of song that it has mixed in a million poems, and every blacksmith is a harmonious blacksmith. Even the village children feel that in some dim way the smith is poetic, as the grocer and the cobbler are not poetic, when they feast on the dancing sparks and deafening blows in the cavern of that creative violence.” -G. K. Chesterton

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.5	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, December 6th, 2023.
0:10.4	Today's poem is by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and it's called The Village Blacksmith.
0:18.9	It's a bit longer, so I will offer a few comments and then just read it one time.
0:27.6	Longfellow is one of my very favorite poets.
0:30.6	I was born 1807, he died 1882, before retiring to write full time, he worked as a teacher for many years. And by every
0:43.1	account, Longfellow was just an absolute good man, which is sometimes a delight and relief to learn about great men of any kind.
1:00.5	Poets in particular tend to be a mixed bunch, but Longfellow, absolute stand-up gentleman of a human being,
1:09.7	despite a great deal of suffering that he underwent in
1:15.4	his life, which I will leave you to learn more about on your own, because his biography is long,
1:23.8	rich and engrossing, and I don't want to sell it short here. In fact, a few years ago,
1:28.6	a great new critical biography of Longfellow was published called The Cross of Snow.
1:34.6	It's well worth your time if you can find that.
1:38.9	In the meantime, here is the village blacksmith, a moving portrait of a very mundane kind of life and work,
1:49.1	but ascend up to a kind of moral exemplar that a man like this village blacksmith can be,
1:56.3	also bearing up under some personal tragedy, but serving as an emblem publicly to the rest of his community of perseverance and all around goodness.
2:10.6	Here's the village blacksmith. Under a spreading chestnut tree, the village Smithy stands.
2:21.4	The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands, and the muscles of his brawny
2:26.9	arms are strong as iron bands.
2:30.0	His hair is crisp and black and long.
2:33.2	His face is like the tan.
2:35.2	His brow is wet with honest sweat.
	...

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