The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls

2 Pages 422 Words

The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


The poem “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls” written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is a very well written poem. Longfellow is known to be one of the best authors of all time; but this poem has its good points and it’s bad points. Some of the good points are the very even rhythms he uses, also the way he describes the travelers “life”. But in my opinion this poem also has some fairly large flaws. Some of the flaws are the fact that at the end of the poem Longfellow jumps to talking about horses, also he uses so words that no one knows what they are.
Longfellow does a very good job of keeping the rhythm in this poem. In each line he makes it rhyme with the last. By doing this he makes the poem flow very nicely and makes it sound very nice. I think that is part of what makes this poem.
Another thing that is very good about this poem is the way Longfellow relates the “travelers” “life” to the tide. This makes it a very metaphorical poem and by doing this he puts many underlying meanings to it that make this poem much more entertaining. This is one of the few good things about this poem.
One of the main things that came to mind is how Longfellow jumps from topic to topic in this poem. For example, he goes from talking about the traveler to talking about how there are horses stamping and neighing and about the hostler. To me this kind of confused me because I was expecting to here more about the traveler but instead I get horses. This kind of irritates me.
The last thing that I will complain about today is the fact that he uses language that confuses people and words that no one has ever heard of. I know that this partly because this was written many, many years ago and some people probably understood this, but not all because not everyone was as educated as he was or even as we are today and it confused me the first time I read it. That I can underst...