The Wreck of the Hesperus
poem
"The Wreck of the Hesperus" is a narrative poem by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, first published in Ballads and Other Poems in 1842. It is a story that presents the tragic consequences of a skipper's pride. On an ill-fated voyage in winter, he brings his daughter aboard ship for company. The skipper ignores the advice of one of his experienced men, who fears that a hurricane is approaching. When the storm arrives, the skipper ties his daughter to the mast to prevent her from being swept overboard. She calls out to her dying father as she hears the surf beating on the shore, then prays to Christ to calm the seas. The ship crashes onto the reef of Norman's Woe and sinks; the next morning a horrified fisherman finds the daughter's body, still tied to the mast and drifting in the surf. The poem ends with a prayer that all be spared such a fate "on the reef of Norman's Woe."
The poem was published in the New World, edited by Park Benjamin, which appeared on January 10, 1840. Longfellow was paid $25 for it, equivalent to $810 in 2025.
Inspiration
Longfellow combined fact and fiction to create this poem.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Wreck of the Hesperus” as poem. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as poem. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7776274. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1842, 1840 and 2025.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
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- Expand the search: follow The Wreck of the Hesperus primary sources, The Wreck of the Hesperus archive and Wreck research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “The Wreck of the Hesperus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.