The Jewish Cemetery at Newport by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

First published: 1854; collected in The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems, 1858

Type of poem: Meditation

The Poem

“The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” is a lyric meditation in fifteen rhymed quatrains. The title indicates the location where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow focuses his reverie on time, history, and death. As in the tradition of English meditative poetry of the eighteenth century, the poem at once paints a visual portrait of the cemetery yet also uses the place as a way to explore the poet’s own reflections.

The poem is set in Newport, Rhode Island, at the oldest Jewish burial ground in America, one long since abandoned. It is written from the perspective of a solitary observer basically identical with the poet himself. In the first two stanzas, the poet regards the cemetery, muses over its desertion, and thinks not only of the desolate present but also of its hallowed past.

In the fourth stanza, reading the names chiseled on the gravestones, the poet is caught by the incongruity between the biblical first names of the deceased and their Spanish and Portuguese surnames. This leads him to imagine the people behind the names, initiating the central movement in the poem, from the fourth to the eleventh stanzas. In this part of the poem, the poet conjures up a vivid spectacle as he contemplates the story of those now dead. He envisions the people worshiping in the synagogue, chanting Psalms, and mourning for their dead. He asked what prompted the Jews to emigrate, what “burst of Christian hate” led them to undertake the perilous voyage to America. The poet is eloquently aware of the oppression and suffering they had undergone in their lives, “The life of anguish and the death of fire,” as well as the pathos of their deaths. With a historical sensitivity rare for his time, he mentions the many persecutions Jews had suffered at the hands of Christians who had accused the Jews of killing Christ.

In the final four stanzas, the poet takes a more detached point of view. Shifting from his imaginative vision of the experiences of those buried in the cemetery, he reflects on the implications of their fate. The poet feels pity for them, but he also admires their ability to persist through such obstacles. The persistence of their faith through the centuries moves him deeply. Because of their persecution, however, the Jews have had to bury themselves in their past. They read the “mystic volume” of the world “backward, like a Hebrew book.” Instead of investing their hopes in the American promise offered to others who have made a similar journey, the Jews focus on the study of their religion and their laws. The poet sees this immersion in the past as grim and deathlike, yet he respects the learning and commitment this past inspired and is even astonished at its determination to endure in a new and strange land. Death, though, overtakes even the most determined of human traditions. The poem ends with the realization that, despite the sympathy and regret of the poet, “the dead nations never rise again.”

Forms and Devices

Longfellow adapts his stanzaic form from poems in the English tradition, such as Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” These poems, like “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” are concerned with the presence of death in the midst of a human landscape. The first and third lines of each four-line stanza rhyme, as do the second and fourth. This variety of stanza gives the impression of ceremony and dignity. The rhyming words are usually of one or two syllables and often contain very sharply defined vowels and consonants. This effect contributes to the sense of enclosure and reflective weight to be found in the poem. Longfellow departs from the tradition by his own highly individual stress and meter, which do not always follow the largely iambic patterns expected in English prosody since the Renaissance, and the poem’s forms convey a sense of familiarity and ease. This ease assists in transmitting the very specific subject matter of the poem to an achieved poetic level.

The poem is filled with many strong visual images. These images do not point to the physical reality of the cemetery before the poet’s eyes as much as to the scenes in the life that the poet imagines for the dead who are buried there. Much of the imagery is, either implicitly or explicitly, biblical. Longfellow, who was not Jewish himself, drew upon the knowledge of the Old Testament he possessed by virtue of his Christian background to supply the detail for his picture of the Jews buried in Newport. Longfellow assumes that the reader is educated and shares this knowledge. By comparing the lives of the Newport Jews with those of their biblical forebears, Longfellow lends the poem an aura of emotion and reverence. There is a sense that the cycle of life and death related in the poem has occurred not once but many times since biblical days. Longfellow’s skillful choice of words (for example, when he rhymes “Synagogue” with “Decalogue,” the Latin phrase for the Ten Commandments) combines specifically Jewish and biblical images with more universal poetic ones. An instance of this practice occurs when he speaks of the Jews living in “Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire.”

When specifically biblical terms are not being employed, Longfellow uses a diction that aspires to rhetorical heights. Longfellow’s words express feeling, yet also decorum and gravity. By using words that even at the time seemed old-fashioned, such as “climes” and “spake,” the poem exudes a sense of respect for the importance and venerability of its subject, and also of the tragic, somber level of its theme.

Although the poem is basically a monologue by the poet-observer, at times the poet seems to be speaking not only to himself but also to a more general reader. This is especially true when exclamation points are used in the first and final stanzas. The punctuation in both cases seeks to arouse the reader into responding intellectually and emotionally to the subject.

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