This paper examines Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic narrative poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, focusing on the poet's use of literary devices to convey themes of tragedy, displacement, and cultural identity. The analysis traces the recurring word "tremulous" across both parts of the poem, demonstrating how Longfellow applies it to both human characters and natural phenomena to evoke anxiety and impending doom. The paper also identifies and explains examples of simile, metaphor, allusion, and personification, showing how these devices contribute to the poem's romantically tragic mood and its connection of Evangeline's emotional experience to the natural world.
The paper demonstrates close reading: the student selects a specific, repeated word and tracks its appearances across the poem's structure, then explains the cumulative emotional and thematic effect. This technique — identifying a lexical motif and building an interpretive argument around it — is a foundational skill in literary analysis.
The paper opens with a brief introduction to the poem's plot, historical context, and thematic concerns. It then devotes the bulk of its analysis to the motif of "tremulous," cataloguing its appearances and interpreting their significance. A subsequent paragraph surveys additional literary devices (simile, metaphor, allusion, personification) with cited examples. A short concluding statement synthesizes the poem's mood. The structure moves from broad context to specific evidence and then back to a general interpretive claim.
Evangeline is Longfellow's epic historical love poem, based loosely on American and Canadian history. Subtitled A Tale of Acadie by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poem traces the tragic tale of its titular heroine, Evangeline. She is separated from her husband and reunited with him only after years of traveling and searching — a journey not unlike that of Ulysses. Setting and culture are especially poignant themes in Longfellow's poem. At the outset, the poet establishes the tranquility of Acadie and then details the hardships of life in North America, with particular attention to French and Cajun cultures.
In Part One, Canto 3, Longfellow writes of "the tremulous tides of the ocean." In Canto 4, Evangeline cries out to Gabriel with a "tremulous voice," and similarly in Canto 5 the Acadian peasants sing with "tremulous lips." In Part Two, Evangeline again speaks with a "tremulous accent," and in Canto 3 of Part Two, Longfellow describes the "tremulous gleam of the moonlight" — using the word once more to describe both human and natural phenomena.
Signifying the condition of trembling, the word evokes anxiety, fear, trepidation, and even the suggestion of seizure. The sense of impending doom that pervades the poem, along with its themes of death and travesty, is encapsulated by this single word, used repeatedly but judiciously by Longfellow. When he applies "tremulous" to the tides of the ocean and the gleam of the moonlight, he personifies those natural elements in order to connect Evangeline's inner experiences with the natural world around her.
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