A Samaritan Woman by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It's a dramatic monologue delivered by the Samaritan woman from the Gospel of John, chapter 4. As she walks to Jacob's Well at noon, she notices strangers in town and reflects on her people's sacred history — just moments before meeting Jesus. Longfellow captures her inner thoughts right before that significant encounter unfolds.

In the Gospel of John, the fact that she arrives at the sixth hour (noon) is important. Normally, women would collect water together during the cooler morning hours. Her choice to come alone in the heat of midday hints that she is trying to avoid the other women, likely due to her social reputation (the Gospel later discloses that she has had five husbands). Longfellow highlights this detail through the sweltering heat he depicts at the start of the poem.

Samaritans and Jews have a long history of religious and ethnic rivalry. Following the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel, the local population intermarried with Assyrian settlers. This led to the emergence of the Samaritan community, which created its own version of the Torah and chose to worship on Mount Gerizim instead of in Jerusalem. As a result, Jews typically viewed Samaritans as impure and kept their distance. The woman's pride in Gerizim, along with Abraham's sacrifice and Joseph's tomb, serves as her subtle resistance to that dismissal.

Galilee was a northern region of ancient Israel, and Galileans had a distinct accent in Aramaic—much like how a regional dialect can signify someone’s background today. Jesus and his disciples hailed from Galilee. The woman recognizes the strangers by their speech, adding a realistic element to the scene. To her, "Galilean" and "Jew" are practically interchangeable terms: both are seen as outsiders who don't belong in Samaria.

The poem is crafted in blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter. This mirrors the form Shakespeare employed for his dramatic speeches, making it ideal for a dramatic monologue. It captures the rhythm of natural speech while avoiding the sing-song quality of rhyme, allowing the woman to sound as if she's genuinely thinking out loud.

It's truly both. Longfellow was writing within a broader work focused on Christian history, so the religious backdrop is authentic. However, he fully humanizes the woman—giving her sensory experiences, mild irritation, ethnic pride, and curiosity—before any miracle or revelation occurs. The poem's strength lies in that mix: a sacred story conveyed through the lens of an ordinary, fully developed human mind.

Gerizim is the holy mountain for the Samaritans, situated close to Shechem (referred to as "Sychem" in the poem). Instead of building their temple in Jerusalem, the Samaritans chose this location, which became a significant point of contention between the two communities. In John 4, the woman directly questions Jesus about whether worship should take place on Gerizim or in Jerusalem. Longfellow illustrates that she is already contemplating this issue before she even addresses him.

Stopping right as the woman reaches the well and spots the stranger sitting there is a purposeful dramatic decision. The entire poem builds up — the heat, the strangers, the ethnic tension, the pride in her homeland — and then the actual moment of their meeting is left just out of sight. This choice makes the reader sense the gravity of what’s about to unfold without laying it all out, shifting the focus to the woman's inner experience rather than the miraculous event itself.