Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is…

The lines form the second stanza of “A Psalm of Life”, subtitled “What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist”. The young man refuses the mournful lesson that “Life is but an empty dream”: the soul that slumbers is dead, and things are not what they seem. Then the stanza: life is real and earnest, the grave is not its goal; “Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.” The poem goes on to its best-known images, hearts beating “Funeral marches to the grave”, the “Footprints on the sands of time”, and ends with “Let us, then, be up and doing”.

Longfellow wrote the poem in 1838, when he was a young professor at Harvard, a few years after the death of his first wife. It appeared in a magazine that year and in his first collection, Voices of the Night, in 1839.

For a century the poem was learned by heart in American schools, and this stanza became a motto of energetic optimism, mocked by some and cherished by many.

A Psalm of Life (Voices of the Night), stanza 2, 1839

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work