The Jewish Cemetery at Newport

“The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” is an 1854 lyric poem by American poet and educator Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Constructed as an elegy—an ode to the dead—the poem is written in 15 four-line stanzas (quatrains) with an ABAB rhyme scheme. The poem is evocative and solemn and considered distinctive in Longfellow’s large corpus—its language is richer and ideas more complex than many of his other works. Reminiscent of both romanticism and the tradition of 18th century English meditative poetry, the poem fixes a particular location in vivid detail but uses it to expand upon the poet’s thoughts. Though the poem borrows its form from the elegiac tradition in English poetry of the 18th century, the poem’s theme of the religious persecution of Jewish communities marks it as an unusual elegy. Poet Dana Gioia described the poem as “one of the great elegies in American literature and also one of the few great nineteenth-century poems that’s really about the burden of immigration.”

Like almost all of Longfellow’s poems, “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” was popular on publication. However, even at the time some readers found the poem’s gloomy ending problematic. Subsequently, critics have examined in greater detail Longfellow’s complex portrayal of Jewish communities. Despite the critiques, most scholars agree that Longfellow’s poem was ahead of its time and portrays his subject with keen empathy.

Poet Biography

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a poet and educator with profound influence in 19th century American culture. Born in Portland, Maine in 1807, Longfellow became a national literary figure by the 1850s and by the time of his death in 1882, was an international celebrity admired by likes of novelist Charles Dickens. Longfellow’s popularity spanned continents: In 1884 his marble bust was installed in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in England—a rare distinction for an American writer at the time. In addition to being a poet, Longfellow was a teacher at Bowdoin and Harvard in the early years of his career. He wrote several influential essays and prose pieces. Though Longfellow looked to European literature for inspiration and used the formal conventions of English poetry, his work is charged with a uniquely American spirit of humanism and progressive thinking.

The second son in a family of eight children, Longfellow was born to Zilpah Wadsworth—the daughter of a Revolutionary War hero—and Stephen Longfellow who eventually was a member of Congress. Graduating from Bowdoin College, Longfellow studied modern languages in Europe for three years. In 1831, Longfellow—a teacher at Bowdoin at the time—married Mary Storer Potter. Unfortunately, Mary died in a miscarriage in 1835, plunging Longfellow into grief.

After another year in Europe, Longfellow became a Harvard instructor in 1836. In 1839, he published his first collection of poems, Voices of the Night, followed in 1841 by Ballads and Other Poems. Both books were very popular, but Longfellow's duties as a professor left him little time to write more.

In 1843, Longfellow married Bostonian Frances Appleton. The marriage was very happy and the couple had six children, five of whom survived to adulthood. In 1847, Longfellow published the enormously successful Evangeline. He quit teaching to focus on writing and published Hiawatha—a long poem about Indigenous American life. After Frances’s death in a fire in 1861—the same year the American Civil War began—Longfellow abandoned writing for a couple of years. Yet his fame continued to grow, both in England and America. Abraham Lincoln was one of Longfellow’s chief admirers. In the last decades of his career, Longfellow published seven more books with poems more frequently confronting the subjects of loss and grief.

Longfellow died in 1882, a month after his 72nd birthday. His death was an occasion of national mourning in the United States.

Poem Text

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. 1854. “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport.” Academy of American Poets.

Summary

The speaker is surprised to discover Jewish graves in the seaside town of Newport, Rhode Island—an area with a small Jewish population. The stillness and silence of the grave-dwellers sharply contrasts with the turbulence and roar of the sea.

Dust-covered trees provide a curtain of merciful shade over the graves, in which the sleepers keep “the long, mysterious Exodus of Death” (Line 8). “Exodus” is a book of the biblical Old Testament, sacred to Jewish people. The book describes the migration or flight of enslaved Jews from Egypt to the promised land. Here, the speaker may also be referring to Sephardic (Hispanic people originally from the Iberian Peninsula in modern-day Spain and Portugal) Jews fleeing the Catholic Portuguese Inquisition in the 17th century to settle first in South America and the Caribbean, and then Newport. This inquisition persecuted converted Jews who supposedly betrayed their adopted Christian faith.

The “sepulchral stones” (Line 9) in the cemetery are so ancient they seem to the speaker like the stone tablets declaring the Ten Commandments that the prophet Moses threw down the mountain in the book of Exodus. Tombstones bearing Portuguese-sounding names like Alvares and Rivera are interspersed among those with Biblical names like Abraham and Jacob, suggesting that the Jews in the Newport cemetery are indeed the descendants of Sephardic communities.

The speaker next imagines a burial in the cemetery where the mourners must have proclaimed, in the Jewish tradition, that death is peace and the doorway to an eternal life. Yet the speaker notes the deep irony of death’s finality: The grave dwellers cannot visit the synagogue or sing psalms. It seems the speaker is disputing the notion of life after death.

However, the speaker contradicts this suggestion in the following stanza. They note that though the mourners may have left the cemetery, the dead still remain, cared for by a “hand unseen” (Line 26), or the hand of God. This nurturing hand still keeps “their graves and their remembrance green” (Line 28).

The speaker turns their attention to more earthly matters, wondering how the Jews came to be buried here, far from their homelands. Mincing no words, the speaker asserts it was Christian persecution and hatred that must have driven the Jews over seas and deserts to foreign lands. Here, the speaker refers to the long history of Christian persecution of Jews.

Expanding on the historical persecution of the Jews, the speaker notes that for centuries, Jews in Europe were forced to live in squalor in crowded, separate quarters: “in Ghetto and Judenstrass” (Line 34). Despite the discrimination they faced and anguish they experienced, the Jews kept faith and patience.

Sometimes, the Jewish communities the speaker imagines were forced to leave their beloved lands with very few possessions—with just “the unleavened bread / And bitter herbs of exile and its fears” (Lines 37-38). The reference to bread and bitter herbs is reminiscent of the biblical years of exile before the Jews found their freedom in the promised land.

Every door they turned to was shut in their faces with the denunciatory cry “Anathema maranatha!” (Line 41) referring to the New Testament’s injunction: "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha" (1 Corinthians 16:22). Because in Judaism Christ is a prophet rather than the son of God, Christians consider Jewish people to be heretics worthy of denouncement and punishment. Thus, every “Mordecai” (Line 43; representing Jews) was “mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet” (Line 44).

Still, the Jews did not lose their pride nor a sense of hope. They may have been trampled as the sand underneath feet, but they stayed strong as or the dense earth beneath the sand. Drawing sustenance from their rich religious and cultural heritage and the words of their “prophets and patriarchs” (Line 50), the diaspora persevered, knowing the promised land was in their future.

Because the promised land had been assured to the Jewish people in their ancient books, they looked to the past for inspiration. The speaker compares this love for the past to the reading of the Hebrew alphabet since the alphabet reads from right to left. At this point, the poem’s tone abruptly shifts to fatalism. The speaker claims the Jewish people dwelled so much in the past that “life became a Legend of the Dead” (Line 56).

In the poem’s final stanza, this fatalism deepens as the speaker announces “what once has been shall be no more” (Line 57). The glory of the Jewish nation is indeed a thing of the past and the Jewish people will never have their own country, their promised land. Though the earth continues to bring forth new people, the speaker declares that dead nations do not resurrect.