Longfellow's Hiawatha and Men and Women

Guest post from my Wife:

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, seems to have an understanding of the relationship between man and wife, that is severely lacking in our day, despite, or maybe because of, all our obsession with making things “equal between the sexes”.
He begins Chapter 10 of his Epic Poem, Hiawatha, by saying:

"As unto the bow the cord is,
So unto the man is woman;
Though she bends him, she obeys him,
Though she draws him, yet she follows;
Useless each without the other!"

At the end of the chapter, he again sums up the interplay of interdependence of man and woman in the advice given to Hiawatha and Minnehaha, Laughing Water, by the sun and the moon:

From the sky the sun benignant
Looked upon them through the branches,
Saying to them, "O my children,
Love is sunshine, hate is shadow,
Life is checkered shade and sunshine,
Rule by love, O Hiawatha!"


From the sky the moon looked at them,
Filled the lodge with mystic splendors,
Whispered to them, "O my children,
Day is restless, night is quiet,
Man imperious, woman feeble;
Half is mine, although I follow;
Rule by patience, Laughing Water!"


Though we moderns might wince at the word, “feeble”, yet look who is ruling: both, “Rule by love, O Hiawatha . . . Rule by patience, Laughing Water!” A beautiful echo of the words of St. Paul in Ephesians:

“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”

Anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Every adjustment that minimizes a difference, a vulnerability, in one sex, a differential strength in the other, diminishes the possibility of complementing each other, and leads to a duller vision of human life in which is denied the fullness of humanity that each might have had.” (quoted from Preserve Them, O Lord)

St. Gregory the Theologian said, “In our living together, we are one another’s hands, ears, and feet. Marriage redoubles our strength, rejoices our friends, causes grief to our enemies. A common concern makes trials bearable.”

Oh, that we moderns, with all our “wisdom,” might regain but a small measure of the wisdom of the ancients.