The Day is Done Themes

"The Day is Done" has a lot to say about the feeling of sadness. We're not talking about awful, horrible, crawl-under-the-covers-and-don't-come-out-for-two-weeks sad. This is more like the sort o...

We think "The Day is Done" is all about the power of art.  When the speaker is feeling down, the one thing he can turn to is poetry.  He wants us to know that books and poems can make us...

"The Day is Done" isn't really a "nature" poem.  Longfellow doesn't go on for pages about bunnies or sheep or waterfalls or hillsides.  Still, check out all the images in this poem that c...

In addition to that kind of chilled-out sad feeling the speaker has, there's another kind of bad feeling in this poem.  This one is a lot less fun.  Here we're talking about real sufferin...

This is a less obvious and central theme, but we think it pops up in really interesting ways.  "The Day is Done" has quite a bit to say about how literature comes down to us from the past....