The Village Blacksmith

Years after its publication, a tree mentioned in the poem was cut down and part of it was made into an armchair which was then presented to Longfellow by local schoolchildren.

Children coming home from school stop to stare at him as he works, impressed by the roaring bellows and burning sparks.

On Sundays, the blacksmith, a single father after the death of his wife, takes his children to church, where his daughter sings in the village choir.

Longfellow wrote to his father on October 25, 1840: "There will be a kind of Ballad on a Blacksmith in the next Knickerbocker, which you may consider, if you please, as a song in praise of your ancestors at Newbury.

[10] In 1879, years after the publication of "The Village Blacksmith", the local schoolchildren in Cambridge, Massachusetts presented Longfellow with an armchair made from "the spreading chestnut tree" in the poem which had recently been cut down.

[14] "The Village Blacksmith" is written in six line stanzas alternating between iambic tetrameter and trimeter with a regularity of cadence and rhyme that mimics the stability invoked in the poem's narrative.

[15] The title character of the poem is presented as an "everyman" and a role model: he balances his commitments to work, the community, and his family.

[16] The character is presented as an iconic tradesman who is embedded in the history of the town and its defining institutions because he is a longtime resident with deeply rooted strength, as symbolized by the "spreading chestnut tree".

[18] Further, Simon Bronner notes that, like Nathaniel Hawthorne's woodcarver character in "Drowne's Wooden Image", Longfellow is praising the craftsman in a time of industrialization.

[20] In several interviews, baseball player and manager Billy Southworth noted that his father recited the poem to him as a child, that he himself memorized it, and that it inspired him as an adult.