 Hi, my name is Julia Kirby and I'm here on behalf of the Portland Public Art Committee, which is pleased to bring you another series of art in our front yard, talks about the public art throughout Portland. Today we are delighted to have famed author and playwright Monica Wood speak about the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the square that bears his name. Hello everybody, my name is Monica Wood and as a writer I feel uniquely unqualified to be speaking about public art. However when the Portland Public Art Committee asked me to do one of their art talks, they assured me that I could choose any piece of public art, my thought instantly went to the Longfellow Monument, in part because my taste in public art tends toward the traditional. I love this one, I love Lady Victory down on Monument Square, I love the Lobsterman on Temple Street, I like the John Ford statue on Danford Street, so I thought this one would be a good choice for me, but mostly I chose it because I'm quite fond of the guy sitting up there in that chair. I feel a kinship with him as a fellow writer. So here we are at Longfellow Square, a busy Longfellow Square in Portland, Maine, in the grand shadow of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose life spanned most of the 19th century. He died in 1882 at the age of 75, which was a pretty good old age at that time. He was a true son of Portland, in fact he grew up right down the street on Congress Street in what is now known as the Longfellow House, next door to the Maine Historical Society. And if you have not yet taken a tour of the Longfellow House, I would highly recommend it. You learn a lot about Portland and there's something about that house that is special and that is the Longfellows are the only family that ever lived in it, so there are no recreations. Everything in the house belonged to them, all the cups and saucers, all the doilies, all the furniture, so it's a wonderful tour and I highly recommend it. Now our friend Henry here was a scholar and a linguist who had a great facility with languages. He spoke three or four or five languages well and he taught modern languages at Bowdoin College and then later at Harvard. But Henry's gig was poetry and in his lifetime he was the most famous and most beloved poet in the entire English-speaking world and it's very hard for us to imagine now how that could possibly be true to have a lowly wretched writer be such a huge personage in the world, but Henry was. He was so famous and so beloved, in fact, that not long after his death a committee called the Longfellows Statue Association, which was composed of prominent men in Portland for whom streets are now named, they decided to begin plans for this monument in what was then called State Street Square. The chosen artist was a sculptor named Franklin Simmons who was a prominent sculptor of the day and he was another main boy. He was born in Webster, Maine, but he grew up in Bath and Lewiston so they chose a main boy to make a sculpture to honor a main boy. In fact, as you'll soon see, this whole shebang is a Portland, Maine outfit from top to bottom. It's pretty cool actually. I'm pretty sure that Franklin Simmons who did Lady Victory down on Monument Square and has a bust of Ulysses Grant on permanent collection at the Portland Museum of Art. I'm pretty sure whether or not he was born in Maine, he would have gotten the job anyway because he really was very well known. Now, at the time, Franklin Simmons was working out of a studio in Rome. So he created the statue out of cast bronze in his studio in Rome and then they shipped it over here, which must have been quite undertaking, I can imagine. You can see it's huge. The pedestal was designed by Portland architect Francis Fassett and was fabricated by the Hawks Brothers Stonecutting Company down on Myrtle Street near City Hall. So again, Maine, Maine, Maine. It's pretty cool. Now, the unveiling of this monument was a big, fat deal. Everyone loved Henry Longfellow, of course, and knew the family. And as I said, the statue was brought over here, but they had to hide it for a week because the unveiling was a big deal, there was a program and they had to set up all the chairs and everything. And so they covered it with an American flag and it sat there for a week covered. And I like to imagine the people coming by and trying to peek under the flag and see what it might look like. And on the day of the unveiling, it was a day in September, very close to today as a matter of fact, but it was not a day like this. It was cold and it was breezy, but people came in great numbers and were thrilled to be there. And according to the newspaper report of that day, when the flag was whipped away, there was invited a great applause. And it goes on, the modeling is admirable. Even the shoestrings have received great care. So you can look at the shoestrings up there. My personal favorite thing on that sculpture is the cat heads on the arms of the chair. And I think they're supposed to be lions, but I somehow see them as cats because I think of Henry as more of a cat man than a lion man. I just have that feeling about him. The entire cost of this monument was $17,000, which was a boatload of money back then as you can imagine. And the base of the pedestal was a gift of Payson Tucker, who was the GM of the main central railroad. This monument was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1990. Now our friend Henry here was known the world over in part for history poems that took from historic events. And though he did appeal to scholars and readers of all stripes from every walk of life, people loved his poetry, but he appealed in particular to children. Schoolchildren routinely memorized the poems of Longfellow that we still know today. And in fact, there may be people here today who can remember, memorizing part of or all of poems like Paul Revere's Ride, The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline, The Village Blacksmith, Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree, A Village Smithy Stans. I remember reading The Wreck of the Hesperus when I was in probably fifth grade. And I can remember being utterly bowled over by the rolling, crashing description of this horrible shipwreck and this young girl who was in great peril. Henry really did have a way of writing that appealed to kids. And I find that very fitting because Henry himself came from a family that valued its children, even indulged its children. Henry in turn was a wonderful father and very indulgent of his own children. And he was really beloved by children all over the world. One of the most appealing aspects of this monument for me is something I found out when I was doing a little bit of research for this talk today. And that is, at the beginning, the Longfellow Statue Association decided that because Longfellow was known as a poet of the people and the children's poet, that it would be a great idea, very fitting, to have part of it financed by any person with a small sum so that everybody could have a chance to contribute. Children across New England were also encouraged to donate a nickel, a dime, or a penny of their own money that they earned, which they did by the hundreds. And these kids earned this money. And some of them were talking about the late 1800s, so some of them were probably actually working at jobs that we would never have a child do these days. So they sent in their tiny fortunes, and in return, they got an embossed card with an image of Longfellow on it. And what I did not know, it's the sweetest thing about this monument, is that the names of all of those children are on the premises here, they're in a copper box beneath the pedestal. It's a kind of time capsule, isn't that cool? Yeah. And also in that copper box, there is a copy of each of the 11 newspapers published in Portland at the time, 11 newspapers in a city with a fraction of this population. That blew my mind. And there's also a copy of the Portland City Directory of 1888. And there is a copy of Francis Fassett's original drawing of this pedestal. So even if we had a horrible disaster, and there was like the tornado of the millennium or earthquake, and our dear Henry toppled over a pedestal in awe, at least we would have the compensatory pleasure of getting our paws on that copper box. I would love to be able to open that right now. Now we tend to think of Longfellow as a poet of romantic stories and nature imagery, and he certainly was that. And he was thought of as a good-natured man with a gentle disposition. Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to him as a sweet, gentle man. Now when you look at this grand representation of him, sweet is not the word that comes to mind, but apparently he really was. He was a sweet guy. And you would think that somebody with a sweet disposition like this probably had a fairly easy passage through life, but that is not the case with Henry Longfellow. He suffered great personal tragedy in his life. His first wife, they were on a trip to Europe. He was doing one of his linguistic acquisition trips, and she had a miscarriage at the age of 22 and died of the complications. Henry mourned her death very deeply. In fact it was three years before he could even bring himself to write a poem in her memory. And then his second wife, her name was Fanny, he courted her for seven years before she agreed to marry him. I would love to know the details of that story. He was madly in love with her. They had six children together and she also died of a horrible freak household accident when her dress caught fire in the house and Henry himself was burned trying to save her. She succumbed to her grievous injuries and Henry probably never really got over that loss. He loved her so much and they had also lost a little girl in babyhood. She was named for her mother and she died at age one. So our Henry was no stranger to personal grief, but there was another great sorrow in his life that was shared by every other American and that is the tragedy of the American Civil War. One of Henry's dearest friends was a Republican abolitionist senator from Massachusetts named Charles Sumner who was nearly beaten to death on the Senate floor a few days after he gave a fire and brimstone speech filled with lots of colorful language and insult about the obscenity of slavery. This Southern congressman took great issue with this speech and a couple of days later came in, found him in the Senate chambers and he had a stick, a metal tipped stick of the sort used to keep dogs in line and he proceeded to beat Charles Sumner nearly to death. So there's a flood of blood, he's unconscious, you can imagine the horror of this story and Henry his dearest friend took this very, very hard and Henry is one of the people who helped Charles with both his physical and his spiritual recovery after that incident. Henry not only offered comfort, encouragement and sometimes money to fellow abolitionists, he used his greatest gift, poetry, to try to turn public opinion against slavery. One of his publications was entitled Poems on Slavery which included this verse that brings the reader into the terrified heart of a fleeing slave. In the dark fens of the dismal swamp, the hunted negro lay, he saw the fire of the midnight camp and heard at times a horse's tramp and a bloodhound's distant bay. His cadences are very beautiful. In that same vein, one of Longfellow's most well-known poems is something that we have now appropriated as a Christmas carol and we call it, I heard the bells on Christmas day, I heard the bells on Christmas day, their old familiar carols play, and wild and sweet the words repeat, peace on earth goodwill to men. Well in fact that poem, there's a dark thread that runs through it and that runs through a lot of the poems he wrote at that time. He called it Christmas bells and it is really about the heartache and horror of the civil war and here are two verses that we never hear when we're singing it as a Christmas carol and there is a line in there that refers to each black accursed mouth and what he's referring to there is the mouth of the black cannons and they go like this, then from each black accursed mouth the cannon thundered in the south and with the sound the carols drowned of peace on earth goodwill to men. It was as if an earthquake rent the hard stones of a continent and made forlorn the household's born of peace on earth goodwill to men. You know he was a complicated guy, our friend Henry here. He was famous, he was wealthy, he was greatly cherished. He suffered irreplaceable family losses and the loss of the unity of his country and through it all he wrote and he wrote and he wrote which is why I just love him. So the next time you're stuck in traffic here at Longfellow Square instead of cursing the driver ahead of you who didn't jump the light I would recommend that you just take a breath look up to Henry say hello and maybe try to recall a few lines of poetry that you might once have committed to heart when you were a child. It might be one of his poems, it might be somebody else's but I can't think of a more pleasant way to wait for the light to change and I can't think of a more appropriate way to honor the life of Portland's favorite son Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Thank you. Thank you very much everybody for being here.