Spelling and Defining by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It isn't a poem in the traditional sense. There's no meter, rhyme, stanzas, or figurative language. Instead, it's a prose instructional piece—probably a teacher's note or editorial preface from a 19th-century school reader. Seeing it attributed to Longfellow is likely a mistake or a cataloguing error.

Longfellow was one of the most frequently anthologized American poets of the 19th century, and his work showed up in numerous school readers. This passage was probably included as introductory material in one of those readers—guidance for teachers printed alongside Longfellow's poems—and may have been mistakenly cataloged as his own writing.

Here, it refers to the ability to distinguish between different shades of meaning—examining a word in context and selecting the specific sense that the author intended instead of relying on the most common dictionary definition. This concept isn't related to bias or prejudice; rather, it reflects an older meaning of the word, which involves nuanced judgment.

The main point is that meaning depends on context. A word can have different meanings in different sentences, so students should learn to consider what a particular author intended by a specific word in a particular poem—not just rely on the dictionary definition.

Because if you take the time to analyze every word while reading a poem, you miss out on experiencing it as a poem. The week's gap allows students to appreciate the poem as a complete work first, so when they come back to it for vocabulary exercises, the reading experience remains intact and isn't overshadowed by word drills.

The use of the term 'pupil' points to a grammar school audience, typically children aged 8 to 14 according to 19th-century American education norms. The described approach — starting with reading lessons and then moving on to spelling lessons — was common for that age group.

It means that the context around a word helps you understand its meaning. For instance, the word 'light' has a different connotation in a poem about grief compared to one about sunrise. The author encourages teachers to ensure that students grasp this concept instead of assuming every word has a single, unchanging definition.

As a piece of writing, it’s straightforward and reasonable, though not particularly literary. Its historical significance lies in how it sheds light on the teaching of poetry in American schools during the 1800s. Its focus on contextual meaning is surprisingly progressive for classroom pedagogy of that era.