Poetry: The Jewish Cemetery at Newport - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I read a lot of poetry, and write it as well. I have posted poems here before, as can be seen by clicking on the Poetry label at the bottom of this post.

Almost every Friday I recite my poetry at a local open mic, so I thought Friday would be a good day of the week to share a weekly poem on a topic related to genealogy. Occasionally I will share my own poetry, but I am going to start off with a classic.

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,

Close by the street of this fair seaport town,

Silent beside the never-silent waves,

At rest in all this moving up and down!

The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep

Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath,

While underneath these leafy tents they keep

The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.

And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,

That pave with level flags their burial-place,

Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down

And broken by Moses at the mountain's base.

The very names recorded here are strange,

Of foreign accent, and of different climes;

Alvares and Rivera interchange

With Abraham and Jacob of old times.

"Blessed be God! for he created Death!"

The mourners said, "and Death is rest and peace;"

Then added, in the certainty of faith,

"And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease."

Closed are the portals of their Synagogue,

No Psalms of David now the silence break,

No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue

In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.

Gone are the living, but the dead remain,

And not neglected; for a hand unseen,

Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,

Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.

How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,

What persecution, merciless and blind,

Drove o'er the sea -- that desert desolate --

These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?

They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,

Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire;

Taught in the school of patience to endure

The life of anguish and the death of fire.

All their lives long, with the unleavened bread

And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,

The wasting famine of the heart they fed,

And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears.

Anathema maranatha! was the cry

That rang from town to town, from street to street;

At every gate the accursed Mordecai

Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.

Pride and humiliation hand in hand

Walked with them through the world where'er they went;

Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,

And yet unshaken as the continent.

For in the background figures vague and vast

Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime,

And all the great traditions of the Past

They saw reflected in the coming time.

And thus forever with reverted look

The mystic volume of the world they read,

Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,

Till life became a Legend of the Dead.

But ah! what once has been shall be no more!

The groaning earth in travail and in pain

Brings forth its races, but does not restore,

And the dead nations never rise again.

Longfellow was a great poet, but not the best of historians. Whenever I read such lines as "Gone are the living, but the dead remain" and "dead nations never rise again" a quote of Mark Twain's comes to mind: The report of my death was an exaggeration. (link to handwritten note of Twain's...this quote is often reworded.)

However, Longfellow isn't to be completely blamed. The Touro Synagogue is the oldest Synagogue in America (estab. 1763), but from about 1781 to 1883 the Synagogue lay empty, though preserved. (The cemetery goes back to 1677) Timeline.