Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.

The line ends “A Psalm of Life”, nine stanzas in which a young man answers a psalmist for whom life is an empty dream. Life is real and earnest, it replies; our destined end is “to act, that each to-morrow Find us farther than to-day”. In “the bivouac of Life” we must be heroes, not “dumb, driven cattle”. Great men’s lives remind us that we can leave “Footprints on the sands of time” for a “shipwrecked brother” to see. The last stanza calls us to be “up and doing, With a heart for any fate”, and closes on this line.

Longfellow wrote the poem in 1838, while teaching at Harvard, a few years after the death of his first wife; it appeared in the Knickerbocker magazine that autumn and in his first collection, Voices of the Night, in 1839. It became one of the most memorised poems in English.

Its cheerful energy was later mocked, but several of its lines remain proverbial, and its last words are still offered to the impatient.

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

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work