In "The Village Blacksmith" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, humanity's fate is compared to the blacksmith's work. The blacksmith is a person who works with metal, usually iron, heating it and hammering it to change its shape. In the poem, changing the shape of one's life and fate is compared to how the blacksmith changes the shape of metal, presumably turning it into something useful. The last four lines of the poem read,

Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought.

The forge is the place where the blacksmith heats up metal, and the speaker of the poem is comparing the blacksmith's forge to "the flaming forge of life," saying that human destiny changes shape just like the blacksmith's metal does. The speaker says that our fortunes must be wrought, which means shaped by hammering, like a metal must be. This could be interpreted to mean wrought by God—although the speaker does not mention God in this last stanza, despite mentioning church, the parson, and paradise earlier in the poem. Longfellow could simply be saying that humans have to work out their own fortunes by shaping what "each burning deed and thought" will be, and he also compares shaping deeds and thoughts to shaping hot metal on an anvil.