Evangeline: With Notes and Plan of Study

In 1755, British soldiers tore a peaceful community apart. The Acadians of Grand-Pré were ripped from their farms and scattered across the colonies, and in the chaos, Evangeline lost Gabriel, the man she had loved since childhood. What follows is one of literature's most haunting searches: two people, endlessly walking different roads, always arriving just after the other has left. Longfellow wrote this poem in dactylic hexameter, that ancient meter of Homer and Virgil, and the steady, rolling rhythm only deepens the sense of endless journeying. Though the poem fixed a historical tragedy into legend, and simplified the complexities of Acadian history in the process, it captured something true about loss and longing that transcends any specific era. Evangeline became the symbol of a displaced people, and her search for Gabriel became the search for everyone who has ever tried to find their way back to something irretrievably lost. This is Longfellow at his most melancholy, his most musical, and his most enduring.