Somewhere in the middle decades of the 20th century, advanced poetic taste decided that sentimentalism in general, and the sentimentalism of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) in particular, was unbearable. Before that, Longfellow’s 1860 poem “The Children’s Hour” had been widely taught to schoolchildren in America — a somewhat strange choice, admittedly, since it is a poem more about children than for children. The emotion is a father’s, not his daughters’, and the references are not within a child’s range: the Franco-Italian naming of an old bandit as a “mustache,” for example, or the gesture toward the German folk tale of a wicked ruler, the bishop of Bingen, being devoured by mice — a legend that Longfellow almost certainly learned from Robert Southey  (1774–1843).

The dismissal of the poem from the schoolbook canon, however, probably had more to do with a growing sneer at Longfellow as just too maudlin and sappy a poet. I mean, a poem about a father wrestling his daughters into a hug and vowing to keep them forever “In the round-tower of my heart”? Ick, his modern critics thought, and so they taught us to think. But sentimentality is over-criticized these days, when it is, at its best, an extravagant gesture toward true emotion. And there have not been many better light-hearted attempts to express a father’s love than “The Children’s Hour.”

The Children’s Hour
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
That is known as the Children’s Hour.

I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.

From my study I see in the lamplight,
Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair.

A whisper, and then a silence:
Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
To take me by surprise.

A sudden rush from the stairway,
A sudden raid from the hall!
By three doors left unguarded
They enter my castle wall!

They climb up into my turret
O’er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape, they surround me;
They seem to be everywhere.

They almost devour me with kisses,
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti,
Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old mustache as I am
Is not a match for you all!

I have you fast in my fortress,
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
In the round-tower of my heart.

And there will I keep you forever,
Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
And moulder in dust away!

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.