The poem describes a young man passing through a mountain village. He bears the banner "Excelsior". The traveller disregards warnings from villagers of fearful dangers above, and an offer of rest from a local maiden. The youth climbs higher until a last distant cry interrupts the prayers of the monks of Saint Bernard. "Lifeless, but beautiful" he is found by the "faithful hound" half-buried in the snow, "still clasping in his hands of ice that banner with the strange device, Excelsior!" Longfellow's first draft of "Excelsior", now in the Harvard University Library, notes that he finished the poem at three o'clock in the morning on September 28, 1841. The poem came to him as he was trying to sleep. "That voice kept ringing in my ears", as he wrote to his friend Samuel Gray Ward, which caused him to get up and write the poem immediately. "Excelsior" was printed in Supplement to the Courant, Connecticut Courant, vol. VII no. 2, January 22, 1842. It was also included in Longfellow's collection Ballads and Other Poems in 1842. The title of Excelsior was reportedly inspired by the state seal of New York, which bears the Latin motto Excelsior. Longfellow had seen it earlier on a scrap of newspaper. Longfellow explained the repeated title as from the Latin, Scopus meus excelsior est. Biographer Charles Calhoun suggested the Alpine setting was an autobiographical reference to the poet's then-unsuccessful wooing of Frances Appleton, daughter of industrialist Nathan Appleton.
Adaptations and parodies
The popularity of "Excelsior" inspired many parodies, adaptations, and references in other media. The poem was set to music as a duet for tenor and baritone by the Irish composer Michael William Balfe, and became a staple of Victorian and Edwardian drawing rooms. Longfellow's acquaintance Franz Liszt composed an adaptation as a prelude to his longer Longfellow adaptation of The Golden Legend. He began writing it for Baroness von Meyendorff in 1869; it premiered in Budapest on March 10, 1875. A Plea for Old Cap Collier by Irvin S. Cobb, satirized it. His description is partly based on an illustration used in the readers. The words quoted are Longfellow's:
There is a Lancashire version or parody, Uppards, written by Marriott Edgarone hundred years later in 1941. James Thurber illustrated the poem in Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated in 1945. Thurber chose nine poems for the series, including John Greenleaf Whittier's "Barbara Frietchie" and Rose Hartwick Thorpe's "Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight". In Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, the entire action of the play happens in a fictitious New Jersey town with the name "Excelsior". Longfellow is also directly mentioned with a fictitious poem towards the end of Act I. Lorenz Hart alludes to Longfellow's poem in the title song of the musical On Your Toes:
The poem is the base for the motto of Wynberg Allen School in Mussorie, India. It is also the name and motto for the Brampton, Ontario, Canadabox lacrosse teams. In 1871 Mr. George Lee, a Brampton High School teacher introduced lacrosse to the town. He proposed the name "Excelsior", which he took from Longfellow's poem. In 1883 the Brampton Excelsiors Lacrosse Club was officially formed. The name has been used for all levels of box lacrosse in Brampton ever since. Sam Loyd's chess problem Excelsior was named for this poem. In Italy "", the Tridentin Alpine Society which is the largest section of the Italian Alpine Club has "Excelsior" as its motto referring to the poem of Longfellow. In Charlotte MacLeod's Something In the Water, Peter climbs a steep slope to visit an elderly woman; and, at the finish of the climb, "he felt like the youth who bore 'mid snow and ice a banner with a strange device; he had a sneaking urge to shout 'Excelsior!'"
