a poem by the US poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . It was in his collection Ballads and Other Poems (1841), which also included The Village Blacksmith . It tells the story of a father and his small daughter who die when their ship hits rocks during a storm. It includes these lines:
‘O father! I see a gleaming light.
Oh, say, what may it be?’
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he. The phrase like the wreck of the Hesperus may be used to mean ‘very untidy’ or ‘in a ruined state’.