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Longfellow’s poem takes place in a village near the sea. Longfellow lived and wrote near the Atlantic in New England, so it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that the poem’s setting resembles the kind of coastal town he was most familiar with. However, because the speaker offers very few concrete details about the place, and because even those details (e.g., the curlews, the hostler) are generic, the poem’s precise setting is difficult to pinpoint. In any case, what’s more important than the specific location is the type of place. Because it’s positioned near the sea, the village occupies a transitional space where sea and land come together. The time of day is similarly transitional. The poem opens at twilight, when the coming of night shrouds everything in darkness. By the time the poem closes, a new dawn is breaking. In the transition back from night to day, the mysterious traveler disappears from the village—symbolically transitioning from life to death. It’s also important to note how all-encompassing the environment is in Longfellow’s poem. The references to the traveler are brief and spare, and they effectively get swallowed up by the ceaseless dynamism of the wider seaside landscape.

Next section Themes

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