The Village Blacksmith, under a chestnut tree

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published 1841 371 characters easy

Under a spreading chestnut-tree The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands, And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong as iron bands. His hair is crisp, and black, and long; His face is like the tan; His brow is wet with honest sweat, He earns whate’er he can, And looks the whole world in the face, For he owes not any man.

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About this text

Longfellow published The Village Blacksmith in 1841 in Ballads and Other Poems, and the smithy stood in Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was near his own house. When the chestnut tree was felled, children of the town put their pennies together and had a chair made for the poet from its wood. Wikisource carries the anthology text.

Where this text comes fromThe poem is an account of a trade, and the details are correct: the muscles the work builds, the tools, the position of the shop on the street. Longfellow was writing about a real smithy he walked past, and the accuracy is part of the argument, because the point of the piece is that ordinary labor deserves the same treatment as heroes and battles. The ballad meter carries that: it is the measure used for stories about knights, applied here to a man hammering iron.

What you might not noticeThe chestnut-tree of the first line is set with a hyphen, the way the compound was written in 1841, and the tree in question was real enough that the town later made a chair from its wood. Source

What it trainsTwelve capitals in 371 characters and only two of them stand where a sentence starts, because ballad lines begin with a capital regardless of where the grammar is. Eight commas and three semicolons run the clauses, and the semicolons do the work full stops would do in prose, which means the passage never quite stops. One hyphenated compound, chestnut-tree, at thirteen characters. One apostrophe hides in whate’er, where the cut vowel is easy to miss, and this edition sets it as the straight mark your keyboard produces. Two sentences average thirty-six words, so the punctuation is dense but the units are long.

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Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg