ABSTRACT
The wedding morning of Priscilla Mullins and John Alden begins with a splendour that contrasts vividly with the bleakness of the New England landscape and seascape Longfellow has created earlier in his poem. References to the sufferings and deaths of this first winter run all through the poem that Longfellow called an Idyl of the Old Colony times; a bunch of May-flowers from the Plymouth woods. The John Alden of 'The Courtship' is a gentle, delicate, scholarly man as well as a builder of simple, prosaic houses. Praised by Hawthorne, Whittier and countless other readers, this poem sold nearly 36,000 copies within ten years and was hailed by the British Fraser's Magazine as the first great American poem. Longfellow's source was history here, for the Acadian removal had occurred in 1755, as a punishment for their supposed loyalty to the French king. In Hiawatha Longfellow turned his attention to the wild once more when he made Indian legends his theme.
