Someone who “looks like the wreck of Hesperus” isn’t exactly looking their best. The idiom comes from a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, inspired by an 1839 blizzard off the coast of Massachusetts that destroyed 20 ships. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Wreck of Hesperus”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Rick Howell calling from Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin.
Hi, Rick. Welcome to the show.
Hello, Rick. What can we do for you?
Well, I was wondering, my grandmother used to have a saying, and I don’t know if it was she made it up or if it’s bigger than that. Anyway, she used to say sometimes that you look like the wreck of the Hespers. And when she said that, it was usually if you look kind of a little tattered and torn maybe, and like you’d been through a battle or something. And I didn’t know if she made that up or if it was based on something historical.
-huh, the wreck of the Hespers, did you say? How would you spell that?
I don’t know, actually. I just heard her say it, but I think it’s like H-E-S-P-E-R-S. At least that’s how I heard it.
Okay. There’s something to it. There is something to it. She didn’t have the name of the wreck exactly right.
Oh, okay. The name of the wreck is the Hesperus, H-E-S-P-E-R-U-S, Hesperus.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Okay. And if you look that up, it’s a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow back in 1842. He published this poem, and it’s a poem about a terrible, terrible shipwreck, about a captain who takes his daughter to sea, and the boat gets just busted to smithereens by a storm, and she’s lashed to the mast and drifting in the water, dying. And it’s horrible, and all this stuff washes up on shore. And it’s just, I mean, if you look like the wreck of the Hesperus, you look pretty bad.
Yeah, it’s all written on, he wrote this based on the blizzard of 1839 off the coast of Massachusetts. It’s where something like 20 ships foundered and 40 some odd lives were lost. It was a really big deal at the time. Apparently there wasn’t really a Hesperus. He may have combined a few names and a few facts together to make one story. But this is the kind of poem, not this day and age, but there was a time where this is what you would memorize in class, in school. This is the poem that you would have to present at the end of the year during the, you know, your equivalent of the finals or when the parents came to see what you’d been studying.
Right, right, PTA night or something like that.
Yeah, something like that, yeah. Hands behind your back reciting it, you know.
Exactly, up on the stage. And, yeah, the language is simple enough and the story is dramatic enough. I mean, it’s really sort of disaster literature. It’s pretty gripping.
Wow, we must have looked awful when she said that to us.
Apparently so. Yeah, there’s been a little bit of amelioration of what it means to look like the wreck of the Hesperas.
Wow.
Thanks, Rick.
Yeah, thank you very much.
Take care now.
Take care, yeah.
All right.
Bye bye, Rick.
It includes such brilliant parts as this: Oh father, I see a gleaming light. Oh say what may it be. But the father answered never a word. A frozen corpse was he.
Oh, oh.
But you know if you’re an elementary school kid, that’s pretty cool, right?
Yeah, this is your roadside accident to look at. You’re a looky-loo for this poem, right?
19th century looky-loos, yes. Slowly driving by.
It’s a little melodramatic, though, right?
I read it, and it makes my heart race.
It is out of copyright. You can find the full version of The Wreck of the Hesperus all over the Internet.
Yes, with beautiful illustrations.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Yes.
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