The Masque of Pandora

The Masque of Pandora is a verse drama by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, originally published in 1875. Longfellow, the American poet who lived from 1807 to 1882, was the most popular American poet of the nineteenth century and the central figure in the American literary establishment of the second half of the century. The Masque of Pandora belongs to his later poetic work, after the major narrative poems Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles Standish that had established his enormous national popularity in the 1840s and 1850s.

The poem retells the classical Greek myth of Pandora, the first woman created by Hephaestus at the command of Zeus, who was given a sealed jar containing all the evils of the world and who eventually opened the jar releasing the evils into human experience while leaving only hope remaining inside. Longfellow handles the material in the verse drama form, with characters speaking elevated dramatic verse across several scenes that work through the major elements of the myth from Pandora’s creation through her marriage to Epimetheus to the opening of the fatal jar.

Longfellow had a long interest in classical and European mythological material and produced various works drawing on the major mythologies of the West across his career. The Masque of Pandora belongs to this strand of his work and reflects his characteristic combination of careful technical craft with a willingness to handle the elevated subject matter that the verse drama tradition required. The verse is competent and at times beautiful in the way that the best of Longfellow’s work always managed, though the poem has never been considered one of his major achievements.

The poem was published in book form with several shorter pieces and was reasonably well received in its initial publication, although it did not achieve the kind of enormous popular response that the major earlier narrative poems had generated. Longfellow’s reputation was already secured by the time he produced this later work and the various critics of the day treated it as an interesting if minor addition to his substantial body of work.

The book is short and reads in a single sitting. For readers interested in Longfellow’s later poetry and in nineteenth century American verse drama, this is a representative example. It pairs naturally with his other verse dramas including The Spanish Student and Christus.