Wit & Attitude Quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Longfellow doesn’t romanticize heartbreak as a plot twist you “get over” by sheer will. He calls out the social theater of recovery: the polite insistence that a disappointed passion can be wrapped up cleanly, like a letter resealed and sent back. “Foolish to pretend” targets performance, not feeling. The real injury isn’t only the loss of the beloved; it’s the pressure to prove you’re fine on schedule, to treat grief as a lapse in self-control.

The line works because it quietly swaps melodrama for anatomy. Passion becomes a wound, and the metaphor refuses the fantasy of total restoration. A scar isn’t ongoing bleeding, but it is permanent evidence: the body remembers what the mind might prefer to rewrite. Longfellow’s subtext is almost moral in its clarity: denial is the real foolishness, because it demands amnesia. The scar is a sober middle ground between obsession and erasure.

Context matters. Longfellow wrote in a 19th-century culture that prized composure, propriety, and the management of private emotion. His own life carried public grief and private loss; even without biographical footnotes, you can feel the era’s tension between sentiment and restraint. He’s granting permission to acknowledge damage without glamorizing it. The scar becomes not a weakness but a record of having risked depth, and of having survived it without claiming it never happened.