This popular poem by American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was first published in the literary magazine, The Knickerbocker, in 1838. The following year, this poem was collected with several other early Longfellow works and published in a volume titled Voices of the Night. Longfellow revisits the idea of likening poems to psalms as well as other themes from “A Psalm of Life" in subsequent works on several other occasions, including one entitled "The Reaper and the Flowers" which was originally subtitled "A Psalm of Death".