A Psalm of Life

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
    Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
    And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
    And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
    Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
    Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
    Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
    And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
    Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
    In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
    Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
    Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!
    Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
    We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
    Footprints on the sands of time;—

Footprints, that perhaps another,
    Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
    Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
    With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
    Learn to labor and to wait.

This text follows Project Gutenberg’s edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (eBook 1365), which reproduces the Household Edition published by Houghton Mifflin in 1902, with the poem’s original indentation. In that edition, the poem carries the subtitle “What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist.”

The line numbers on this page count only lines of verse and skip the blank lines between stanzas.

Longfellow revised the poem after its first appearance. In The Knickerbocker, the stanzas were numbered, a short motto from the 17th-century poet Richard Crashaw stood above the poem, line 23 read “Act—act in the glorious Present!” and lines 28 and 29 began with “Footsteps” rather than “Footprints.”

“A Psalm of Life” is a lyric poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, first printed in the September 1838 issue of The Knickerbocker, a New York monthly, and collected the next year in Voices of the Night (John Owen, 1839), his first collection of poems. In nine short stanzas, it answers the claim that life is “an empty dream” with a call to act, to work, and to keep going. For much of the 19th century, it was one of the most quoted poems in English, and its “footprints on the sands of time” are still a common phrase.

Our reading is that the poem is less a cheerful sermon than an argument with despair, written by a young widower who needed the argument himself. Its optimism is hard-won. At its center, the speaker hears our own hearts beating “funeral marches to the grave,” and its final call to “labor and to wait” asks for patience as much as effort. The exclamation marks are the sound of someone talking himself back into life.

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Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Themes · FAQ
Glossary · Related Poems

Summary

The speaker, who the subtitle tells us is the heart of a young man, answers a psalmist who has called life “an empty dream.” Don’t say that, the heart replies. A soul that sleeps through life is already dead, and things are not what they seem. Life is real and serious, and the biblical words “dust thou art” describe the body, not the soul.

Neither pleasure nor sorrow, the heart goes on, is the purpose of life. The purpose is to act, so that each new day finds us further along. Time is short, and our hearts beat like muffled drums in a funeral march, so we should not be driven along like cattle. We should be heroes in the battle of life.

The heart warns against trusting the future or living in the past and urges action in the present, with God overhead. The lives of great people show that we can also leave “footprints on the sands of time,” and those footprints may one day give hope to a lost and shipwrecked traveler. The poem ends with a call to be “up and doing,” to keep striving, and to learn patience.

Background

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, on February 27, 1807. By 1838, he was a professor of modern languages at Harvard, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and known mainly as a teacher, translator, and author of prose.

Three years earlier, his first wife, Mary Storer Potter, had died in Rotterdam during a long trip to Europe. “A Psalm of Life” came out of the years of grief that followed. Longfellow had also been lecturing on the German poet Goethe, whose ideals of striving and useful work are often heard in the poem.

According to accounts of its writing, the poem followed a conversation with his Harvard colleague Cornelius Conway Felton about how to bear oneself bravely in “Life’s battle.” Longfellow kept it to himself for a while, calling it a voice from his inmost heart, and is said to have read it to his students after a lecture before he sent it to a magazine.

It appeared in the September 1838 issue of The Knickerbocker, credited only to “L.” Longfellow is reported to have been promised five dollars for it and never paid. In 1839, it was collected in Voices of the Night, his first book of poems, which went through several editions within a few years.

Longfellow treated the poem as the start of a series. In the same book, “The Light of Stars” was presented as “A Second Psalm of Life,” and “The Reaper and the Flowers” first carried the subtitle “A Psalm of Death.”

The poem spread quickly. It was memorized in schools, printed in the McGuffey Readers, and sometimes sung as a hymn. In 1865, Longfellow received a Chinese fan inscribed with a translation by the scholar-official Dong Xun, based, according to scholars, on a version by the British diplomat Thomas Francis Wade. It is often described as one of the earliest Chinese translations of an English-language poem.

Its reputation fell in the 20th century, when critics found its uplift too easy. The writer Charles Calhoun has called it one of the most memorized and most ridiculed poems in English. Still, it remains one of the few Longfellow poems that anthologies regularly include.

Analysis and Themes

“A Psalm of Life” is often read as a simple pep talk. Read closely, it is an argument with a darker voice, and its encouragement is built on a clear view of death.

An Argument With a Psalmist

The title promises a psalm, but the poem opens as a reply: “Tell me not.” The psalmist is never named, and the poem doesn’t point to a specific psalm. What the heart rejects is the mournful view that human life is brief and unreal, a view heard in parts of the Book of Psalms and in Ecclesiastes.

The young man’s answer is impatient and emphatic. Nearly every stanza contains a command or an exclamation, and the voice sounds less like a preacher than like someone refusing to give in.

Body and Soul

The second stanza turns on Genesis 3:19, where God tells Adam, “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Longfellow agrees that the body goes back to dust, but he insists that the words were “not spoken of the soul.”

This distinction lets the poem accept death completely without despair. The grave is real, but it “is not its goal,” so life has a direction beyond the body’s end.

The Funeral March at the Center

The fourth stanza is the darkest in the poem. “Art is long, and Time is fleeting” adapts an ancient saying of the Greek physician Hippocrates, best known in Latin as “Ars longa, vita brevis.” There is always more to do than time to do it.

Then comes the poem’s most striking image: our hearts, “though stout and brave,” beat like muffled drums playing “Funeral marches to the grave.” Every heartbeat counts down. The call to “Be a hero in the strife” follows directly from this image, so the poem’s courage is a response to mortality, not a denial of it.

Footprints and the Shipwrecked Brother

In the seventh and eighth stanzas, greatness matters less for its own sake than as an example. The lives of great men remind us that we can leave “Footprints on the sands of time,” and a “forlorn and shipwrecked brother” may see them and take heart.

Footprints on sand are a modest image. The tide can wash them away, and the poem promises only that someone might see them. That modesty keeps the stanza from sounding like a promise of fame.

Form and Technique

The poem has nine quatrains rhymed ABAB. It is written in trochaic tetrameter: each line has four beats, and each beat falls on the first syllable of a pair. The odd lines have eight syllables and end on an unstressed syllable, giving two-syllable rhymes such as “numbers” and “slumbers.”

The even lines drop that last weak syllable and land on a stress, as in “LIFE is BUT an EMP-ty DREAM.” This alternation gives the poem a marching, drumlike rhythm that suits its muffled drums and its field of battle. Longfellow later used unrhymed trochaic tetrameter for The Song of Hiawatha (1855).

The style is built on commands and exclamations: “Tell me not,” “Be not like dumb, driven cattle!” “Be a hero,” “Trust no Future,” and “Act.” The poem uses nine exclamation marks in 36 lines, most of them in the middle stanzas, where the argument is most urgent.

The last stanza changes the grammar. Instead of telling “you” what to do, the speaker says “Let us,” and includes himself. Its final line pairs effort with patience, and “to wait” may echo John Milton’s sonnet on his blindness, which ends, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Notable Lines

Three passages carry most of the poem’s fame.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Lines 5 to 8

The second stanza states the poem’s thesis in two short exclamations. Then, it reads the Bible’s “dust thou art” as a statement about the body alone, which clears the way for everything that follows.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

Lines 13 to 16

Here, the poem faces death directly. The heart that urges courage is also the drum that keeps time to the funeral, and the stanza’s calm rhythm makes the image more unsettling.

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;—

Lines 25 to 28

These are the most quoted lines Longfellow wrote. The stanza ends with a dash and runs straight into the next one, where the footprints become a comfort to someone else, so the famous image is only half of the thought.

Themes

Four ideas run through the poem, and each one answers the psalmist’s claim that life is empty.

Action

The poem’s central demand is to act. “But to act,” “Act,—act in the living Present,” and “be up and doing” all insist that purpose comes from doing rather than from feeling, whether the feeling is enjoyment or sorrow.

Mortality

Death is present in almost every stanza, from the grave in line 6 to the funeral marches in line 16 and the dead Past in line 22. The poem never pretends that life is long. Its urgency depends on knowing that it is short.

Legacy and Example

The footprints of great lives show what is possible, and ordinary lives can leave footprints of their own. The poem values them for the help they give others, not for the fame they bring.

Patience

The final word is “wait.” After eight stanzas of urgent commands, the poem closes by asking for endurance, a reminder that a life of work also includes long stretches of hope without visible results.

Frequently Asked Questions

These are the questions readers most often ask about “A Psalm of Life.”

What Is the Main Message of “A Psalm of Life”?

Life is real and worth living, so people should spend it acting rather than mourning. The poem rejects the idea that life is “an empty dream,” admits that time is short and death is certain, and urges readers to work, to follow the example of great lives, and to be patient. Its last line, “Learn to labor and to wait,” sums up that balance of effort and endurance.

Who Is the Psalmist in “A Psalm of Life”?

The poem never names him. The subtitle says the poem is what “the heart of the young man said to the psalmist,” so the psalmist stands for the mournful voice that calls human life brief and unreal, a voice heard in parts of the Book of Psalms. Many readers think first of King David, the traditional author of the Psalms, but the poem argues with an attitude rather than a particular person.

What Does “Footprints on the Sands of Time” Mean?

It means the mark a life leaves behind for others to follow. In the seventh stanza, the lives of great men show that ordinary people can also make their lives “sublime” and leave such footprints. In the next stanza, a “shipwrecked brother” sees them and takes heart, so the footprints matter because they help someone else. In the first printing of 1838, the word was “Footsteps.”

What Is the Meter of “A Psalm of Life”?

It is written in trochaic tetrameter, with four beats to a line and each beat falling on the first syllable of a pair, as in “TELL me NOT, in MOURN-ful NUM-bers.” Every second line drops its final unstressed syllable, so it ends on a strong beat: “LIFE is BUT an EMP-ty DREAM.” The rhyme scheme is ABAB in each of the nine stanzas.

When Was “A Psalm of Life” Written?

Longfellow wrote it in 1838, while he was a professor at Harvard and living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It appeared in the September 1838 issue of The Knickerbocker, credited only to “L.,” and was collected the following year in Voices of the Night (1839). It came three years after the death of his first wife, Mary Storer Potter.

Glossary

Most of the poem’s words are familiar, but a few are old-fashioned or carry a specific meaning.

• numbers (line 1): Verses or lines of poetry; “mournful numbers” means sad poems or songs.
• slumbers (line 3): Sleeps; here, a soul that sleeps through life instead of living it.
• earnest (line 5): Serious and meaningful, not a game or a dream.
• Dust thou art, to dust returnest (line 7): An echo of Genesis 3:19, God’s words to Adam about the body’s return to earth.
• destined (line 10): Fixed in advance; “our destined end or way” means the purpose or path life is meant to have.
• Art is long (line 13): An adaptation of Hippocrates’ saying “Ars longa, vita brevis”: skill takes long to learn, and life is short.
• muffled drums (line 15): Drums with their heads covered to deaden the sound, played at military funerals.
• bivouac (line 18): A temporary camp for soldiers, without tents or with little shelter.
• dumb (line 19): Unable to speak; “dumb, driven cattle” are animals herded along without a will of their own.
• howe’er (line 21): A shortened form of “however.”
• Let the dead Past bury its dead (line 22): An echo of Jesus’s words in Matthew 8:22, “let the dead bury their dead.”
• sublime (line 26): Noble, grand, or inspiring.
• main (line 30): The open sea.
• forlorn (line 31): Lonely, abandoned, and without hope.

Related Poems

If “A Psalm of Life” speaks to you, these poems share its call to effort, its view of death, or its themes of courage and patience.

• Christmas Bells by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: A later poem in which Longfellow again argues his way from despair to hope.
• Ulysses by Alfred Tennyson: An aging hero resolves “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
• Invictus by William Ernest Henley: A short lyric of defiance that, like the Psalm, refuses to bow to fate.
• When I Consider How My Light Is Spent by John Milton: The sonnet whose last line, about those who “stand and wait,” may lie behind the Psalm’s ending.
• Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley: A darker view of what great lives leave behind on the sands of time.