The Song of Hiawatha: An Epic Poem — Story, Setting & Ideas

Symbolic Language and Picture-Writing

One of the most striking passages in the excerpts is Hiawatha's lesson on picture-writing. He instructs his people to paint each grave-post with its household symbol—Bear, Reindeer, Turtle, Crane, Beaver—inverted to show that the owner is gone. This is not mere decoration; it is a system of communication. The Jossakeeds, or prophets, and the Medas, or medicine-men, paint figures on bark and deerskin for their songs, each symbol corresponding to a specific chant. The love-song, described as "the most subtle of all medicines," is recorded with a human figure in scarlet, meaning "My painting makes me powerful over others." Longfellow thus presents writing as a sacred, magical act, blending art, memory, and spiritual power. The poem itself becomes a kind of picture-writing, where every image—the serpent, the egg, the bloody hands—carries layered significance.

The Four Winds and Hiawatha's Origins

The second canto introduces the Four Winds, each personified as a distinct figure: Mudjekeewis, the West Wind, who becomes Hiawatha's father after slaying the great bear Mishe-Mokwa. Hiawatha's childhood is marked by his interactions with these elemental forces, including his grandmother Nokomis, who falls from the moon. The poem's cosmology is intricate: the earth is drawn as a straight line, the sky as a bow above it, with stars for night and waving lines for rain. Hiawatha's own birth is tied to the wind, and his later adventures—sailing, fishing, and hunting—are all infused with a sense of mythic inevitability. The structure of the poem, moving from the peace-pipe through Hiawatha's various exploits, mirrors the cyclical patterns of nature and the seasons, a rhythm that Longfellow maintains with careful consistency.

Tensions Between Tradition and Change

Despite its epic form, the poem is haunted by loss. The final cantos—"The Ghosts," "The Famine," "The White Man's Foot," and "Hiawatha's Departure"—introduce a note of elegy. Hiawatha's lamentation and the death of his friend Kwasind signal a world where the old ways are fading. The arrival of the white man is presented not as a triumph but as a quiet, ominous shift: the title "The White Man's Foot" suggests an irreversible footprint on the land. Hiawatha's departure, sailing westward into the sunset, leaves his people with a legacy of picture-writing and peace, but also with an uncertain future. Longfellow, drawing on Schoolcraft's collections, does not resolve this tension; instead, he lets the poem end on a note of dignified sorrow, as Hiawatha vanishes into the distance, a culture hero whose work is done.

Readers approaching The Song of Hiawatha should attend to its dual nature: it is both a narrative of heroic deeds and a repository of symbolic meaning. The poem rewards those who notice recurring motifs—the number four, the colors of paint, the animals that serve as totems—and who consider how Longfellow adapts oral sources into a written epic. The meter, often criticized for its monotony, actually reinforces the incantatory quality of the legends. Rather than seeking historical accuracy, one might read it as a 19th-century attempt to preserve and reshape Native American stories, a project that is as much about the poet's own culture as about the one he describes.

Reading about Hiawatha’s patient fasting, I remembered sitting by a rainy window as a child, turning pages of The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes 1-6. The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century — Inside the Classic until my tea went cold. Both books held that same hush—listening for old voices in a language almost forgotten, yet somehow familiar as a heartbeat under snow.