The Jewish Cemetery at Newport

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray (1751)

Written a century before “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” this poem by Thomas Gray is one of the most famous elegies in English poetry. The poem perfects the elegiac form and meter, which Longfellow uses. “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is written in quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme and fluid iambic pentameter. Gray’s poem departed from the elegiac tradition in the sense that it mourns no one famous or close to the poet, but anonymous people buried in a rural landscape. The poet uses the fate of the unknown dead to ponder the fate of all mankind. Longfellow’s poem reflects the humanistic outlook seen in Gray’s famous elegy.

“A Psalm of Life” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1838)

This earlier poem of Longfellow’s oeuvre has both form and themes in common with “A Jewish Cemetery at Newport.” Both are written as quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme; the earlier poem also asserts life be lived in the present rather than the past. “A Psalm of Life” has a certain carpe diem quality to it, wherein a young man asserts to a psalmist—a writer of religious hymns—that “Life is real! Life is earnest! / And the grave is not its goal.” The differences between the poems are as interesting as the similarities and show the evolution of Longfellow’s poetic sensibility. While the tone of “A Psalm of Life” is more assertive and upbeat, that of “A Jewish Cemetery at Newport” is more solemn. “A Jewish Cemetery at Newport” also contains a more complex outlook to the question of life and death, and richer language and imagery.

“In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport” by Emma Lazarus (1871)

Lazarus’s poem is a rebuttal to “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” and challenges Longfellow’s pessimistic view of the fate of the Jewish people. While “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport” mourns the past glory of Jewish culture, the poem ends with the affirming assertion “[n]athless [sic] the sacred shrine is holy yet,” establishing that Jewish tradition is alive and rich. Significantly, Lazarus was a descendant of the Sephardic Jews who migrated to the United States in the 17th century. Her view of Jewish history is markedly different from Longfellow, though with an equal emphasis on its rich glory as the periods of suffering.