Excelsior (Longfellow)

"Lifeless, but beautiful" he is found by a "faithful hound" half-buried in the snow, "still clasping in his hands of ice that banner with the strange device, Excelsior!"

Longfellow's first draft of "Excelsior", now in the archives at Harvard University, notes that he finished the poem at three o'clock in the morning on September 28, 1841.

"That voice kept ringing in my ears", as he wrote to his friend Samuel Gray Ward, which caused him to get up and write the poem immediately.

The poem was set to music as a duet for tenor and baritone by the Irish composer Michael William Balfe, and became a staple of Victorian and Edwardian drawing rooms.

The words quoted are Longfellow's: There is a Lancashire version or parody, Uppards, written by Marriott Edgar one hundred years later in 1941.

Thurber chose nine poems for the series, including John Greenleaf Whittier's "Barbara Frietchie" and Rose Hartwick Thorpe's "Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight".

[7] In Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, the entire action of the play happens in a fictitious New Jersey town with the name "Excelsior".

[8] Lorenz Hart alludes to Longfellow's poem in the title song of the musical On Your Toes: "Excelsior" also became a trade name for wood shavings used as packing material or furniture stuffing.