The Poetical Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Enriched edition. Address to the Moon, The Darken'd Veil, Earthly Pomp, Forms of Heroes, Go to the Grave, The Ocean…

By Nathaniel Hawthorne and Cedric Haynes

Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Poetical Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne' is a collection of poetry that showcases the author's incredible skill in weaving dark and allegorical tales through verse. Known primarily for his novels such as 'The Scarlet Letter' and 'The House of the Seven Gables', Hawthorne's poetic works delve into similar themes of sin, guilt, and the human psyche. His lyrical style and vivid imagery leave a lasting impact on readers, inviting them to explore the hidden depths of the human experience through the power of poetry. The collection provides a unique glimpse into Hawthorne's creative mind and his ability to craft haunting and thought-provoking narratives in a different form of writing. Each poem is a testament to his mastery of language and his profound understanding of the darker aspects of human nature. Through his poetry, Hawthorne offers a rich tapestry of emotions and insights that resonate with readers long after they have turned the final page.

In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience:
- An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection.
- Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer.
- A combined Synopsis (Selection) briefly outlines the key plots or arguments of the included pieces, helping readers grasp the anthology's overall scope without giving away essential twists.
- A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds.
- Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Musaicum Books
• Release date: Nov 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9788027231805

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathanial Hawthorne was the author of many classics, such as THE SCARLET LETTER and THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Poetical Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Enriched edition. Address to the Moon, The Darken'd Veil, Earthly Pomp, Forms of Heroes, Go to the Grave, The Ocean…

Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Cedric Haynes

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Edited and published by Musaicum Press, 2017

ISBN 978-80-272-3180-5

Table of Contents

Introduction

Historical Context

Synopsis (Selection)

The Poetical Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Analysis

Reflection

Introduction

Table of Contents

Curatorial Vision

These works gather Nathaniel Hawthorne’s poems alongside responses by other poets, with a biographical sketch by George Parsons Lathrop to frame the poet within a life. The selection emphasizes Hawthorne’s lyric meditations—on night, sea, mortality, humility, and remembrance—while placing them in conversation with poems that address Hawthorne as subject. The through-line is the tension between interior conscience and public image, between secrecy and illumination. Bringing these pieces together foregrounds Hawthorne’s seldom-emphasized verse and the ways others interpreted his presence. The result is a compact panorama of voice and echo, self-expression and tribute, that clarifies enduring patterns in his moral and aesthetic imagination.

Address to the Moon and The Ocean cast the natural world as a reflective surface for mind and conscience, while The Darken’d Veil contemplates mystery and concealment. Earthly Pomp and Go to the Grave measure worldly display against the leveling certainty of death. Forms of Heroes weighs reputation and the shapes we give to valor. My Low and Humble Home turns inward, honoring plainness and quiet attachment. Together these poems trace a lyric arc from immensity to intimacy, from spectacle to sobriety, shaping a compact poetics of moral attention that is at once contemplative, restrained, and quietly resonant.

Power Against Power by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop and Greatness by Florence Earle Coates consider ethical force and stature, sharpening questions Hawthorne’s poems raise. At Hawthorne’s Grave by Charlotte Fiske Bates, and Hawthorne by H. W. Longfellow, address the commemorative and elegiac dimensions of his legacy. James Russell Lowell’s Hawthorne: A Fable for Critics adds a brisk, appraising portrait that complicates idealization. These works were gathered to juxtapose interior lyric with external address, allowing Hawthorne’s themes to reverberate through differing temperaments. As a set, they present a composite figure: artist, moral inquirer, and cultural presence viewed from multiple poetic vantage points.

Rather than isolating either Hawthorne’s poems or a biographical account, the collection brings lyric, portrait, and remembrance into one continuous exchange. The aim is to highlight recurrence and variation: how sea, moon, veil, home, grave, and fame migrate across voices and intents. By pairing Hawthorne’s compact meditations with tributes and assessments, the volume maps an arc from self-articulation to cultural memory. It differs from presentations that treat each element separately by foregrounding the relational texture among them, so that readers may perceive not only individual poems, but the evolving image they collectively form around the name Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay

The Darken’d Veil introduces secrecy as a moral condition; its poise and reserve find echoes in At Hawthorne’s Grave, where quiet address meets the stillness of memorial space, and in Longfellow’s Hawthorne, which shapes reflection into public remembrance. Across these poems, the movement from hiddenness to commemoration is palpable: a veil that withholds, a grave that discloses through silence, a name spoken into common memory. The tonal progression—meditative, then solemn, then ceremonially reflective—creates a dialogue about what the inner life yields to history, and what remains intractably private even under the gaze of honor and mourning.

Address to the Moon and The Ocean present magnitude as a discipline of attention: immensity corrects human pride and steadies thought. In Florence Earle Coates’s Greatness, magnitude becomes an ethical measure, abstracted from landscape and attached to character. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s Power Against Power registers struggle, where moral energies contend rather than repose. Read together, these poems trace a spectrum from contemplative scale to active conscience. The shift in imagery—from cosmic and maritime to conceptual and ethical—reveals a shared pursuit: to weigh force not by noise or display, but by enduring capacity for restraint, clarity, and resolve.

Earthly Pomp, Go to the Grave, and Forms of Heroes examine fame and ceremony with skepticism, placing memory under moral audit. The poems addressed to Hawthorne often enact the very commemorative impulse his lyrics scrutinize. James Russell Lowell’s Hawthorne: A Fable for Critics adds a brisk, occasionally playful appraisal, counterbalancing hallowing gestures with wit. In the friction between internal critique and external homage, the volume locates a productive tension: reputation both constructed and questioned. The tonal contrasts—Hawthorne’s grave composure, Lowell’s quickened cadence, and the commemorative calm of Longfellow and Bates—compose a polyphony of respect, judgment, and reflection.

My Low and Humble Home anchors the set in domestic feeling, an inward counterpart to public remembrance. Its modest tone refracts the broader debate about stature, suggesting that moral gravity may arise from ordinary rooms and habits. The biographical sketch by George Parsons Lathrop complements this note by offering a narrative portrait against which the poems’ values can be gauged. Without repeating the poets’ judgments, it situates the lived texture that their images imply. The conversation that results—between intimate dwelling and outward commemoration—underscores how a writer’s presence is felt both in quiet affiliations and in the ceremonious speech of tribute.

Enduring Impact & Critical Reception

This collection remains vital because it reveals a writer’s double life: the lyric conscience speaking in concentrated images, and the social figure reflected by peers and admirers. In an age attentive to privacy, memory, and reputation, the dialogue among these poems models a careful ethics of attention. Hawthorne’s own pieces reward rereading for their clarity and restraint; the poems on Hawthorne demonstrate how literary presence circulates beyond authorship. By gathering self-utterance with commemoration, the volume provides a concise study in how art moves from solitary perception to shared symbol, without reducing either pole to simple sentiment or verdict.

The presence of H. W. Longfellow and James Russell Lowell signals a recognized place for Hawthorne within American letters; their poems serve as public indices of esteem as well as instruments of appraisal. Charlotte Fiske Bates and Florence Earle Coates add nuanced registers of commemoration and ethical meditation, broadening the lens through which Hawthorne is seen. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s contribution likewise reflects sustained engagement with his moral questions. While critical fashions shift, the convergence of these voices forms a durable benchmark of reception: a chorus that balances praise with criticism, intimacy with distance, and personal regard with cultural measure.

These materials also illuminate the broader afterlife of literary figures, in which graveside meditation, critical fable, and commemorative ode shape public understanding as powerfully as primary texts. The interplay here models patterns that recur in classrooms, civic observances, and artistic homage, where an author’s image is negotiated by peers, readers, and descendants in verse and narrative sketch. By tracing how Hawthorne’s poems meet the poems about him, the collection demonstrates how artistic identity becomes a shared construction. That process, shown without ornament, invites ongoing inquiry into the uses of legacy, the boundaries of admiration, and the discipline of thoughtful praise.

Finally, the collection encourages a balanced reading practice: attention to craft within Hawthorne’s lyrics, and attention to the interpretive acts that surround a writer’s name. The poems by Hawthorne establish touchstones of imagery and conscience; the biographical sketch by George Parsons Lathrop and the poems by Bates, Coates, Longfellow, Lowell, and Rose Hawthorne Lathrop refract those touchstones through memory and evaluation. In presenting these perspectives together, the volume offers a compact resource for thinking about influence, tribute, and judgment. It preserves a conversation in which art, character, and remembrance inform one another without collapsing into sentimentality or mere verdict.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

Socio-Political Landscape

Composed and memorialized during a century that carried New England from Puritan afterglow into mass democracy and sectional fracture, the poems gathered here move within volatile civic weather. The Introduction and George Parsons Lathrop’s biographical sketch stage Nathaniel Hawthorne amid shifting authority—church, party, market, and nation—while the poems, brief yet pointed, weigh public spectacle against private conscience. Address to the Moon and The Darken'd Veil turn from noise to inward measure; Earthly Pomp distrusts aggrandizement; My Low and Humble Home cherishes modesty that resists restless ambition. Political noise never disappears; it hums beneath quiet cadences, shaping the anthology’s moral pitch.

Antebellum reform—temperance, abolition, prison and asylum overhaul, women’s rights—pressed every writer to declare or withhold allegiance. Hawthorne’s poems, as presented here, register the era obliquely, testing the rhetoric of uplift against the stubbornness of human motive. Earthly Pomp rebukes vaunting improvement; Go to the Grave counsels humility before limits that no campaign can repeal. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s Power Against Power, written later, distills the same tension as a contest of authorities—conscience, state, wealth—after war remade the polity. Florence Earle Coates’s Greatness converts status into service, suggesting a civic ethic compatible with restraint. Together, these poems measure reform by the soul’s temperature.

Industrial acceleration transformed New England mill towns, while canals, railways, and seaports braided the region into a national market. The Ocean answers this upheaval with an older, unmastered power, sounding limits to commerce, conquest, and calculation. My Low and Humble Home protects local affections against restless speculation, while Earthly Pomp exposes the brittleness of new fortunes. Lathrop’s biographical sketch, attentive to places and livelihoods, frames this poetic reticence as a cultural posture: a citizenry courting prosperity yet haunted by moral cost. Even when particular policies recede from view, economic modernity furnishes the stage on which these brief meditations perform.

Expansion intensified questions of honor and memory, from the Mexican conflict to ongoing reckonings with Revolutionary legacy. Forms of Heroes interrogates the grammar of commemoration—statues, laurel, parade—asking what, precisely, a polity remembers when it carves a name in stone. James Russell Lowell’s fable-portrait of Hawthorne, included here in its Hawthorne passage, balances praise with wit, implying that satirical scrutiny is itself a civic duty. H. W. Longfellow’s Hawthorne, by contrast, models an elegiac heroism, a public voice softened by private esteem. Between them, the anthology situates courage less in trumpet and banner than in temperate judgment before history.

Religion remained the most durable power in New England towns, though revivals and schisms reconfigured allegiance. The Darken'd Veil trusts the image of hiddenness to acknowledge both faith’s consolations and its inscrutabilities. Address to the Moon translates sermonic awe into cosmic address, finding moral scale in the heavens. Charlotte Friske Bates’s At Hawthorne's Grave sanctifies civic mourning through quasi-liturgical tones, blending churchyard and common green. Lathrop’s biographical sketch, too, treats congregational memory as a civic archive, where private character becomes public exemplar. In this context, the anthology’s meditations on death and secrecy register as political acts of communal self-definition.

War, culminating in the national cataclysm of the eighteen-sixties, altered the register in which elegy could be heard. Though many lyrics predate that crisis, readers have long received them through a postwar hush. Longfellow’s Hawthorne, written as tribute, teaches a rhetoric of national mourning without martial noise. Power Against Power articulates the conscience’s resistance within systems hardened by conflict and victory—suggesting that peace, too, disciplines the citizen. Go to the Grave, heard against regimental losses and shattered families, becomes a rite for the republic’s bereaved. The anthology thus nests personal lament within a widened, chastened civic sensibility.

Gendered authority shifts within the period also mark the collection. As daughter, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop writes into the public square from a familial threshold, testing how kinship can ground civic claim. Charlotte Friske Bates and Florence Earle Coates enlarge commemorative discourse, their poems asserting that women’s voices may define national virtues of steadfastness, humility, and service. Lathrop’s biographical sketch secures the private person for public pedagogy, fashioning Hawthorne as exemplar while guarding his recesses. In this interplay, the household becomes a laboratory of citizenship, and commemoration a negotiation of power among memory-keepers who were once relegated to the margins.

Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents

These texts inhabit an American Romantic temper that cherishes symbol, parable, and the suggestive image. The Introduction and George Parsons Lathrop’s biographical sketch cast Hawthorne as a poet of moral shading rather than manifesto, inclined to veil and emblem over declamation. The Darken'd Veil embodies that impulse, treating opacity as a form of truth-telling. Earthly Pomp adapts the old emblem-book reflex—worldly grandeur as vanitas—while Go to the Grave renews the contemplative memento mori. In this economy, brevity is not evasion but method, allowing a charged stillness to withstand the period’s flamboyant oratory and doctrinal certainties.

Scientific and technological novelties—steam propulsion, electrified news, expanding astronomy—reshaped metaphors that poets could trust. Address to the Moon faces an empirical age without surrendering reverence, translating observation into moral scale. The Ocean, attentive to depth and force, dialogues with maritime science yet refuses to become mere description; it insists on the sublime as a civic educator. Lathrop’s biographical sketch situates Hawthorne within reading habits sharpened by such changes, yet emphasizes a temperament wary of technological hubris. The poems answer measurement with wonder, proposing that a republic preoccupied with instruments still needs languages for awe, limit, and conscience.

The anthology also maps stylistic negotiation among contemporaries represented within it. Longfellow’s Hawthorne offers high-finish lyric tribute, furnishing a canonizing voice of cultural stability. Lowell’s fable portrait sharpens the air with wit, his comic appraisal preserving ethical bite within urbane play. Charlotte Friske Bates supplies a graveyard meditation that aligns civic memory with ritual poise; Florence Earle Coates turns postbellum idealism toward ethical definition; Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s Power Against Power adopts an almost forensic rhetoric. Together, these modes articulate compatible yet rival claims for poetry’s task—ornament, counsel, correction, benediction—thereby staging an instructive debate about art’s public office.

Formally, the poems favor the occasion: graveside address, portrait, admonition, hymn-like reflection. My Low and Humble Home cultivates the domestic lyric as a moral argument about sufficiency and scale. Forms of Heroes enters the public monument debate through meditative measure rather than polemic, weighing sculptural fixity against living memory. Go to the Grave borrows the sermon’s cadence without its dogma, while Earthly Pomp channels emblematic brevity. The Introduction and biographical sketch provide readers with tutelage in decoding such forms, underscoring a period confidence that style itself—restraint, proportion, harmonic closure—could enact civility and thus answer the intensities of the age.

Print culture supplies the enabling infrastructure for these aesthetic choices. Occasional poems thrived in newspapers and memorial volumes; tributes like Longfellow’s and Lowell’s could circulate quickly, becoming civic texts. Bates and Coates worked within a periodical world that rewarded decorum and clarity, even as it permitted pointed critique by tone. The Poetical Works consolidates that dispersed record, with the Introduction and Lathrop’s biographical sketch arranging reception through a biographical lens. Anthologizing converts momentary utterance into an archive of public feeling, setting the solitary lyric alongside civic portrait and parenetic verse, and thereby coupling taste to an ethic of memory.

Legacy & Reassessment Across Time

From the outset, the poet’s reputation was shaped by friendly canonizers within this volume. Longfellow’s Hawthorne supplies a model of tasteful commemoration; Lowell’s satiric fable fixes an image of inwardness and scruple; the biographical sketch by George Parsons Lathrop translates life into exemplary narrative. The poems, though fewer than the prose in fame, have lingered as touchstones of moral temperament: a preference for measured statement, a distrust of blare. As the collection traveled through reprintings, these paratexts guided readers to hear quiet in a loud nation, a guidance that would itself become a subject of later scholarly scrutiny.

Industrial consolidation and the Gilded Age prompted critics to reread Earthly Pomp as an indictment of display and speculative excess. My Low and Humble Home gained currency as a domestic ideal in tension with public graft. Florence Earle Coates’s Greatness, in this climate, answered the era’s question—what makes a citizen admirable?—with a moral calculus against mere wealth. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s Power Against Power found new pertinence as corporate and political entities tested the limits of conscience and law. Thus the anthology’s ethical vocabulary proved elastic, absorbing later conflicts while preserving its nineteenth-century cadence of modesty and measure.

Twentieth-century wars, dislocations, and memorial cultures altered the timbre of elegy across the volume. Go to the Grave acquired liturgical resonance at commemorations; At Hawthorne's Grave offered a script for civic mourning that felt portable to other losses. The Ocean’s imagery of depth and force met anxieties of submarine warfare, migration, and planetary peril, reframing natural sublimity as a register of vulnerability. Longfellow’s Hawthorne persisted as a decorous model of tribute in an era wary of bombast. Through these appropriations, the collection became a toolkit for public feeling, its restrained diction lending dignity to grief-laden ceremonies.

Later decades reopened questions of voice and authority within the volume. Scholars and readers turned renewed attention to Charlotte Friske Bates and Florence Earle Coates, recognizing their commemorative poise as a form of political speech that had been minimized by earlier taste. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s authorship, poised between kinship and public claim, became a case study in how familial framing shapes reception. George Parsons Lathrop’s biographical sketch, once taken as neutral guidance, was reread as a shaping instrument that both protects and limits. These reassessments diversified the anthology’s center of gravity, distributing authority across its chorus of tributes.

Digital recovery and renewed civic argument have kept the collection active. Variant texts and annotations clarify the social references that once felt self-evident; Forms of Heroes now intersects debates about monuments and memory; The Ocean invites ecological readings that turn wonder toward stewardship. The Introduction and biographical sketch, placed alongside memorial poems by Bates, Coates, Longfellow, Lowell, and Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, frame an ongoing question: how should a community speak of virtue and grief? Few answers are final. The anthology endures as a rehearsal space where private consolation and public duty meet, sometimes uneasily, under a changing historical sky.

Synopsis (Selection)

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Introduction situates the volume by proposing why Hawthorne’s seldom-noted verse merits attention alongside his fiction. It signals recurring motifs—moral twilight, veiled perception, mortality, and the natural sublime—and prepares readers for the conversation between Hawthorne’s poems and the contemporaneous tributes that interpret his legacy.

Biographical sketch by George Parsons Lathrop

This sketch outlines Hawthorne’s life and artistic development, linking personal experiences and temperament to the subjects and moods touched in his poetry. It emphasizes the tension between Puritan inheritance and humane sympathy, framing the introspective tone of