Concord Hymn
Concord Hymn
Ralph Waldo Emerson 1847
Also known as the “Concord Ode,” “Concord Hymn” was one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s earliest published poems, appearing in 1847 when he was in his mid-thirties. Prior to that time, he had been known primarily as a lecturer and naturalist. This is probably Emerson’s single best-known piece and has been memorized by many a school-age child. A battlefield monument that commemorates the initial battle of the American Revolutionary War and those who fought in it, the poem also celebrates the merging of the spirit of political liberty and the wonder of natural splendor that is quintessentially American.
As the subtitle—“Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837”—suggests, this poem was written for a single public occasion. It was also apparently meant to be sung, not simply recited. The tune, if there ever was one, has been lost. The use of the word “hymn” suggests that it was a celebratory piece, composed especially for a communal event. Perhaps Emerson is consciously elevating his poem to the public sphere, to distinguish it from a work of more personal expression. This poem makes a fine companion piece to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” another great work about the American Revolution.
Author Biography
Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. He was the son of Ruth Haskins Emerson and William Emerson,
a Unitarian minister who died when his son was eight. Emerson attended Boston Public Latin School and then enrolled in Harvard College at the age of fourteen. After graduation he briefly tried teaching but soon returned to Harvard to attend divinity school. He was ordained a minister in 1829. That same year he married Ellen Tucker, who died of tuberculosis only a year and a half later. Experiencing doubts about Christianity and the validity of organized religion, Emerson resigned his ministry in 1832. He spent the next several months traveling in Europe. While visiting a Paris botanical exhibition, Emerson had a vision of the intimate connection between humans and nature, and he resolved to be a naturalist. In Great Britain he met several of his literary idols, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle, who became a lifelong friend. Upon returning to the United States in 1833, Emerson began a career as a public lecturer, speaking on various topics, including science, biography, literature, and travel. Emerson married Lydia Jackson in 1835 and settled in Concord, Massachusetts, where, except for regular trips in America and abroad, he resided for the rest of his life. In Concord, he became the center of a discussion group called the Transcendentalist Club, which met to discuss religious and philosophical issues. Emerson and the other members of the group developed the theory of Transcendentalism, which holds that humanity and nature are in essence the same and are merely different manifestations of the divine spirit. Transcendentalism has been one of the most influential ideas in American literary history. Emerson’s first book, Nature, an important statement of his Transcendentalist views, was published in 1836. The succeeding decade was the most productive period in Emerson’s career, in which he continued to deliver lectures while publishing collections of his philosophical essays and poetry as well as serving as editor of the Dial, a publication of the Transcendentalist Movement. During the 1850s and 1860s Emerson was an outspoken opponent of slavery and actively campaigned for abolition. By the end of the 1860s, however, his memory began to fail, and he gradually slipped into senility. He died at home in Concord in 1882.
Poem Text
Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept; 5
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone; 10
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare 15
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
Poem Summary
Line 1
“Rude” here means “crude.” While the flood was not a literal flood, this is the beginning of water imagery used in the poem; the actual stream is an implied metaphor for the river of time that is also a theme in the poem. Emerson may be thinking also of the “flood” of freedom that swept over the new nation.
Lines 2-3
According to the British law at the time, it was illegal to display the colonial flag referred to here. So unfurling it in the breeze, in the face of advancing British troops, was a defiant and courageous act. Note, too, that Emerson continues the imagery of both time and nature with “April’s breeze.” Not only did the Battle of Concord take place on April 19th, 1775, but April is the beginning of spring, the season of rebirth. Thus, this bridge could be considered the birthplace of the war that resulted in the colonies gaining their freedom.
Line 4
We are so familiar with this phrase, and it has been reused in so many contexts since it was written, it may be difficult for us to imagine what it was like to have heard it for the first time. In our television age, when CNN shows us battles as they are happening, a shot can quite literally be heard around the world. Not so in Emerson’s time, or when the Battle of Concord actually occurred. The American Revolution was the first successful rebellion by a citizenry against a colonial power; it was an inspiration to many revolutionary movements to come and continues to be so today. So the image of “the shot heard round the world” is quite powerful and appropriate, emphasizing that the battle did more than just defeat these specific soldiers—it marked the dawning of a new age in world history.
Lines 5-6
The alliteration of “silence slept” is echoed a line later by “silent sleeps.” The first phrase, referring to the invading British troops, is in the past tense, emphasizing that they are gone forever. The second phrase is in the present tense, reminding the reader (and any future potential foes) that the spirit of the victorious embattled farmers is still alive and breathing, ready to awaken at a moment’s notice.
Lines 7-8
The bridge itself, just like the men who fought there, has been washed down the river of time. This is not just an image from Emerson’s mind; the original bridge had indeed been replaced. Emerson manages to use this actual fact symbolically, integrating the truth into the theme of the poem rather than inventing another image himself.
Line 9
It is a simple “green bank” and “soft stream,” the kind of place about which Emerson might have
Media Adaptations
- The Spiritual Light of Emerson, an audio cassette read by Richard Kiley, is available from Audio Literature.
- Emerson Poetry read by Archibald MacLeish was released on both audio cassette and phonographic record in 1971 by Caedmon.
- A record titled Ralph Waldo Emerson: American Philosopher was released by Listening Library in 1960.
- Folkways Records released Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Selection from the Essays, the Poetry and the Journals in 1963.
- An audio cassette titled Nature and Spirit: Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson was released by Audio Partners Inc., in 1992.
written a nature poem. The place itself does not have the physical majesty of the fields of Agincourt or Waterloo, the sites of two famous British victories (Agincourt was the site of Henry V’s victory over France in 1415; Waterloo was the site of Napoleon’s ultimate defeat in 1815), yet it still echoes with the enormity of the colonist’s accomplishment.
Lines 10-12
“Votive” means dedicated in fulfillment of a vow or pledge, or symbolizing a wish. In this case, the wish is that the stone will remind the generations to come of what transpired here. In addition, the term might remind us of a “votive candle,” as if to say that this is a living shrine, and the stone commemorates the flame of freedom that still burns.
Lines 13-14
Emerson addresses himself not just to God, but to the Spirit that gave a collection of farmers and merchants the strength to stand on the bridge and face down the British army, the most formidable military power of the time.
Lines 15-16
The monument is not only to the memory of the departed men, but to their spirit of liberty and the other inalienable rights they believed they were endowed with by their creator. Emerson here recalls the ruined bridge that time has swept away, as described in line 7, and asks that the monument be spared a similar fate. It is important to remember, too, that while the colonists won the Battle of Concord—they drove the British back to Boston, a retreat that cost the invaders two hundred casualties—Emerson barely mentions that fact. Throughout the poem, he is more interested in acknowledging the deeper meaning of what the colonists achieved on the bridge than in celebrating a military victory.
Themes
Permanence
Much is made in this poem about the effects of the passage of time. In the first stanza, this theme is only slightly alluded to: in the crude bridge that has withstood the flood; the crude army of farmers that stood up against the troops that tried to bring them down; and in the fact that it mentions April, which is the month when dormant plants all over the northern hemisphere come to life. The second stanza makes change the dominant theme of the poem. It tells readers that not only is the foe gone, but also that the conqueror is gone, and even the bridge that they fought over has been torn apart in time. This idea is picked up again at the end of the next stanza, which contains the reminder that not only will the present generation but also the generations to follow it will eventually die out. After drawing readers’ attention to the ravages of time, Emerson focuses readers’ attention to the fact that the monument being dedicated is made up of stone, which, according to the laws of physics, could be expected to last much longer than either human lives or a wooden bridge. He asks the unspecified Spirit to watch over the monument and to keep Time and Nature from harming it. The poem is therefore not as noble in its praise or reverence for the dead as it might seem at first glance. Freedom and courage are presented as vulnerable things that might be lost in history if they are not recorded for future generations on a stone, and the stone itself is shown to be a fragile thing in the greater universal measurement of time. Only the Spirit, larger than Time or Nature, is presented as being truly permanent, tying the events of the Revolutionary War with the dedication ceremony and on into the future.
Patriotism
This poem itself, although written for a patriotic occasion, is conspicuous in its lack of enthusiasm. It does not portray the Americans as the bearers of all things virtuous or the British as the instruments of evil. The only mentions of the confrontation at Concord during the Revolution are colorlessly descriptive, calling the Americans “the embattled farmers” and “the conqueror,” and explaining that the monument is being erected to remember “their deed” without giving details about what that deed might be. It is not until the fourth stanza that the poem becomes so biased as to praise the dead militiamen as heroes who died for the freedom of their children. The poem does not argue this point or try to prove it, but only takes their heroism for granted. The subject of “Concord Hymn” is not really the acts of the dead soldiers themselves, but the monument that has been erected to them, and in that sense it is more a reflection on patriotism than on heroism, a distinction that is too often ignored. As presented here, the monument is patriotic, because a country is defined by the way it remembers people after their sacrifices are long gone. More than any one human life or generation of individuals, or any functional object such as a bridge, the stone monument would appeal to Emerson’s philosophic nature as a sign of the way that ideas are eternal. It may be the philosopher in Emerson that kept him from speaking strongly for or against any particular nation, making him focus on abstract concepts and objects of nature instead. His brief mention of heroism and freedom, combined with the sense of nationalism that is always bound to battle monuments, however, gives this poem a sublime but powerful sense of patriotism that is appropriate for its intended use.
Nature
The imagery that Emerson uses in this poem directs the reader’s attention—again and again—to the natural setting that surrounds the battle monument. Most of these references are to the river, so that the story that Emerson does not tell directly can be found by paying attention to the river’s actions. The first stanza, for instance, introduces the Battle of Concord with only a few details (embattled farmers and a shot), but it gives the prominent opening line to the image of a bridge being assaulted by a flood, which evokes the battle just as well as statistics about troops and weapons would. The second stanza, concerning the idea that all of the people involved in the conflict were dead by then, tells readers that the bridge was also gone, “swept / Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.” This might seem to imply a sinister fate for the war heroes, being dragged away in creepy darkness, except that the sea seems more impartial and fair than it does frightening, just as the deaths of both “foe” and “conqueror” show death to be impartial. At the time of the monument’s dedication, Emerson calls the river “this soft stream”: it is no longer viewed as hectic and dangerous, just as life is no longer hectic and dangerous to those who take the time to sit back and reflect. This is more than a case of a poet using nature to convey coded messages about life: Emerson is linking human affairs to the motion of nature, implying that we can understand the course of our history by watching how nature behaves.
Style
“Concord Hymn” is tightly constructed of sixteen lines, four stanzas of four lines apiece, with (usually) eight syllables to each line. The lines also end in alternating rhymes, as we can see in the first four lines: “flood” on line 1 rhymes with “stood” on line 3; while lines 2 and 4 end with the rhyming of “unfurled” and “world.” This regularity creates a musical order, which helps the reader enter into the poem in the same way one might enjoy a popular song. Our ears begin to anticipate what will come next. This musicality is also important given that Emerson notes in his subtitle that the poem was “sung” at its first performance.
Another device that Emerson employs here is alliteration, particularly with the “s” sound. Notice “silence slept,” “silence sleeps,” and “soft stream.” In addition to these obvious uses where one word immediately follows another, look at line 12:
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Both “sires” and “sons” begin and end with “s,” and their similar sound emphasizes the connection between past and future generations, which in turn is a major element in the theme of time in the poem. While the word “fathers” would have had the same literal meaning as “sires,” it would not have provided the thematic emphasis, and also would have added an extra syllable to the line.
Topics for Further Study
- Write a “hymn” to some news event that you would not want future generations to forget. Follow the poetic structure of Emerson’s poem.
- Research the “Intolerable Acts” passed by Britain in March of 1774 to punish the colony of Massachusetts for defying British policies. Form teams to debate the fairness of such actions, using modern-day political situations as examples.
- This poem was written more than fifty years after the “shot heard round the world.” How is this fact shown in the poetic strategies Emerson uses?
Historical Context
April 19, 1775
Emerson’s claim that American farmers “fired the shot heard round the world” has become the version of history familiar to most students throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The phrase has been repeated in history textbooks and Revolutionary War memorials until it has become a part of the nation’s identity, but historians have never been able to prove which side actually fired that famous first shot. Whether it was the last blow struck in oppression or the first blow in freedom, the significance to world history would be the same: it marked the start of the first fight against the colonial system, a system that has often been fought since and still shows itself today, though mostly just as pale tradition. The Battle of Concord, which the monument in the poem honors, began after a grueling night of preparation on both sides. The drama began on the night of April 18th, in Boston, where the British military headquarters in the colonies was located. For several years resentment had been building, with the British passing increasingly restrictive laws and the colonists becoming more bold in their disobedience. On April 18th, the Sons of Liberty, a network of spies
Compare & Contrast
- 1775: American consumers protested Britain’s treatment of the Colonies by refusing to buy British products and buying American goods instead; imports from Britain fell by 95 percent.
1837: Due to reckless government investments in the country’s expansion to the West, the United States fell into a period of economic depression, forcing the collapse of many businesses. Great Britain also entered into a depression, partially as a result of bad investments in American businesses.
Today: The International Monetary Fund acts to contain economic crises before one country’s problems can spread to others.
- 1775: The first Abolitionist Society in America, dedicated to abolishing slavery, was founded in Pennsylvania.
1837: Debates between supporters of slavery and supporters of freedom were dangerously violent so often that Congress enacted a “gag law” to suppress public discussion of the subject.
1863: In the middle of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln declared freedom for all slaves in the United States with the Emancipation Proclamation.
Today: Equal treatment for all people in the country continues to be a goal, as government policies seek to cancel traditional oppression.
- 1775: Paul Revere and William Dawes rode on horseback from what is now downtown Boston to Concord, to deliver the message about the approaching British troops. Riding at top speed but stopping at every farmhouse to sound the alarm, the twenty-mile trip took all night.
1837: The first patent was issued for an electronic telegraph, and Samuel F. B. Morse developed the system of telegraphic code that is used to this day.
1876: Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for the first telephone.
1895: Guglielmo Marconi invented the first radio.
1928: The first television receiver for the home, working on the same basic principles that television uses today, was demonstrated in New York.
Today: The Internet is increasingly a source of up-to-the-minute news, although there is no way to assure the truth of what is posted there.
for the colonists, found out about a planned British military maneuver to attack the American underground, take away their weapons, and arrest Revolutionary leaders John Hancock and Samuel Adams. Paul Revere and William Dawes were chosen to ride from Boston to Concord to warn inhabitants there—and in all of the villages in between—about the coming invasion. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1863 poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” has made a simplified version of this warning familiar to generations of school children.) At Lexington, where they stopped to report the news to Hancock, they were joined by a third rider, Dr. Samuel Prescott; when Dawes and Revere were temporarily held by British soldiers, Prescott escaped and took the alarm to Concord.
At the North Bridge over the Concord River, the tired and cold British troops, who had been marching all night from Boston, met a small company of militiamen, who had been waiting for them with loaded rifles. American observers later said that the British commander gave the order to fire, but British participants said that they had been under orders to wait; when the shooting did begin, the casualties were overwhelmingly on the American side, with eight dead and nine wounded, while only a few minor injuries were suffered by British troops. It was after the initial conflict, though, that the British were dealt the first losses of the war. They marched back to Boston in rank, out in the open, in their red uniforms, and from the sides of the road crowds jeered them as they approached. As end of the line passed, the militiamen, who did not have the strong military training that the British troops had, fired at them from behind trees, stones, and walls, picking off British soldiers one at a time. By the end of the day, the British had lost 65 men, 15 of them officers. Both sides felt they had been attacked, and the Revolutionary War was officially declared.
July 4, 1837
The patriotic subject of this poem is fitting for the dedication of a war monument during a Fourth of July celebration, but it is not the sort of theme that is usually associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose strongly expressed ideas seldom dwelled on the glories of war. During his lifetime and in the time since, Emerson has best been known as a leading supporter of the American philosophical movement called Transcendentalism. Religious in the way that it speculated on the nature of God (referred to by Emerson as the “Oversoul”), Transcendentalism placed more emphasis on nature and reason than on the rules of behavior upon which many religions rely. The movement was the natural outgrowth of the Romantic movement that swept through Europe and America in the late eighteenth century. Romanticists looked to nature in itself as a source of knowledge for man, while Transcendentalists viewed nature as a way to come to know the Oversoul, which, like God, was seen as the life force that runs through all things in the universe. Like the militia that fought at Concord, both movements were seen as groups of rebels, casting aside tradition. In the case of Transcendentalism, the rebellion was against the strict religious practices of the Puritans, whose views had dominated the American way of thought ever since the country was settled. The Puritans had been strict in their rules about human behavior: if they had not been, they might not have found it necessary or acceptable to leave Europe, come to an undeveloped land, and wrest it from the native inhabitants. Transcendentalists believed that society was not the standard that determined how humans related with the eternal, but that studying nature was better than studying books for understanding the universe. Famous Transcendentalists included Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau, whose 1854 book Walden, about his life away from society in a shack in the woods, is an American literary classic. In some ways, it is strange that Emerson—who was known as an essayist, lecturer, and a leader of this philosophic movement, but who was not to publish a book of poetry until ten years later—would be chosen to present a poem for this monument’s dedication. On the other hand, the Transcendentalists’ emphasis on independence and self-reliance was every bit as much a part of the American character then as it was when the Revolutionaries first stood up against the army of their rulers.
Critical Overview
Matthew Arnold, a British poet and critic, was not a fan of Emerson’s poetry, considering it too indirect and lacking in energy and passion. In an 1884 essay later published in his “Discourses on America,” however, Arnold did single out “Concord Hymn” for praise, even if it was somewhat backhanded: “Such good work as the noble lines on the Concord Monument is the exception,” Arnold wrote, meaning the poem is superior to Emerson’s other work. Interestingly, while Arnold went to great lengths to criticize Emerson’s poetry, in the final analysis he did consider him a man of superior importance and “a friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit.” Along with Benjamin Franklin, Arnold considered Emerson the most original and “infinitely important” American writer. Another critic, George Arms, has described the language of “Concord Hymn” as “disappointing in its decadent poetic flatness,” but also noted the effective evolution of the piece, beginning as it does with a description of the physical battle and ending by celebrating the non-destructive and “tranquil aspects of time.”
In an 1880 essay, Walt Whitman declared that he did not find Emerson a great poet in his use of language or his choice of subjects and themes, and he also found Emerson’s verse cold and artificial. Whitman even went so far as to say that “it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is.” Whitman did consider Emerson’s spirit to be “exactly what America needs,” however, because Emerson urged the still-young nation to sever itself from its ties to European colonialism and to create itself anew.
Writing in 1897, John Jay Chapman considered the first two lines to be “worthy of some mythical Greek” poet, but then found the rest of the verse to be “crude … lame and unmusical,” a criticism he applied to all of Emerson’s poetry. Chapman maintained that some passages “hurt the reader and unfit him to proceed.” However, he still considered Emerson a “colossus,” towering over not only American literature but the entire culture.
Poet Robert Frost considered Emerson to be one of the four greatest Americans of all time (along with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln). Frost had particularly high praise for “Concord Hymn”: “If Emerson had left us nothing else, he would be remembered for the monument at Concord that he glorified with lines surpassing any other ever written about soldiers.” Frost also emphasized that these words are not merely printed on a page but are carved in stone at the actual spot of the bridge they celebrate. Perhaps Emerson the Transcendentalist would have appreciated the stature, and the possible irony, of having his words immortalized while surrounded by Nature’s glory. Interestingly, Emerson’s grave is also in Concord, Massachusetts, and it too is marked by a rough stone.
Criticism
Chris Semansky
Chris Semansky teaches writing and literature at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon, and he is a frequent contributor of poems and essays to literary journals. In the following essay, Semansky provides historical information concerning the Battle of Concord.
Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” was an occasional poem sung to the tune of “Old Hundred” at the dedication of the battle monument in Concord, Massachusetts on July 4, 1837. The poem evokes the heroism of American Revoultionary War soldiers while at the same time encouraging Americans not to forget the ideals for which those soldiers died. After originally being printed as a broadside and distributed at the ceremony, the poem was frequently reprinted in newspapers. It became so popular that it was even memorized by schoolchildren. Indeed, the line “The shot heard round the world” (which signifies the first shot of the battle) has become part of the American vernacular.
Fought on April 19, 1775, the the Battle of Concord was the second engagement of the American Revolutionary War, following the initial out-break of hostilities in Lexington earlier that same day. Both skirmishes took place in what is now the state of Massachusetts, and combined casualty numbers show that the British lost 272 men and the Americans 95.
The conflict was precipitated by that news that American colonists had gathered large quantities of ammunition and military stores at Concord. British General Thomas Gage ordered approximately 700 soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith to destroy or capture the supplies. The colonists had warning of the impending attack, however. Although popular lore tells of Paul Revere receiving the signal of “One, if by land, and two, if by sea” and alerting the minutemen (American armed civilians who pledged to be ready to fight on a minute’s notice), others, including William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, were also purveyors of that critical information. The readied colonists ambushed the British in Lexington, arousing excitement throughout the countryside but causing no serious impediment to the advancing force.
At 7:30 in the morning, the minutemen took position on one side of the Old North Bridge and stubbornly resisted the advancing troops for a time before retreating. After seeing the smoke from the fire the British had set to destroy their supplies, however, the Americans stormed back. Led by Major John Buttrick, the Americans charged the British, who fell back and began retreating toward Boston. The colonists chased the British all the way to Charlestown, on Boston Harbor. The victory raised American morale and inspired confidence that they could indeed pull off a successful armed resistance against the British Empire.
This is the backdrop to Emerson’s poem, whose images tell us about the young nation that was formed from this battle. The “rude bridge” of the first stanza of “Concord Hymn” refers to the Old North Bridge over the Concord River in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson personifies the bridge, calling it “rude,” because rather than acting as a means of traveling safely over an obstacle, the bridge became a literal killing ground. “Their flag to April’s breeze” refers to the colonial soldiers’ flag blowing in the wind of April, the month of the battle. The flag was of utmost importance to soldiers of the era; if the flagbearer fell in battle, another soldier rushed to keep the vaunted banner from touching the ground. By calling the American troops “embattled farmers,” Emerson emphasizes the fact that, unlike their counterparts, the
What Do I Read Next?
- In the early 1830s French author Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States, interviewing citizens and politicians, and examining the government of this relatively new country. His two-part Democracy in America, first published in 1835 and 1840 and in constant publication since, has become a standard handbook for understanding the nation in Emerson’s time up through today.
- The late Carlos Baker was one of the most respected literary biographers of his generation. Just before his death in 1995, he was working on Emerson among the Eccentrics, which not only gives a portrait of Emerson and of the lives of his contemporaries, including those who were involved in the Transcendentalist movement with him, but also such giants of American literature as Hawthorne (his college roommate) and Melville.
- Henry David Thoreau’s name is often linked with Emerson’s: the two were close friends and were the most articulate and prolific of the New England Transcendentalists. Thoreau lived in Emerson’s house for two years before moving to a crude hut on the shores of Walden Pond to prove that man can live alone with nature and be self-reliant. The book that Thoreau wrote about his experience, Walden, or, Life in the Woods, is as insightful to students today as it was when it was written in 1854.
- Many biographies of Emerson deal with his writings and the times in which he lived. Robert D. Richardson published Emerson: The Mind On Fire in 1995. This is a very human biography of the poet as a real person, covering his loves, his relationship with his family, his inspirations and ordinary day-to-day affairs such as shopping and finances.
- Part of the story of the Battle of Concord was covered later in poetry by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote “Paul Revere’s Ride” in 1863. Longfellow’s poem is similar to Emerson’s in that it gives a reverent version of a part of American history that had already been mythologized as the heroic birth of the country, but Longfellow takes more liberties with the truth in order to tell a dramatic story. This poem can be found in The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which has been in print since its first appearance in 1893.
Americans were not professional soldiers. The phrase “embattled farmers” also puts forth an image of the Americans as largely self-reliant, self-taught men who depended almost exclusively on their courage and strength of conviction to defeat the better trained and equipped British troops in freeing themselves from tyrranical rule. This type of representation, which inspires admiration and empathy on the part of the audience, is necessary for a poem whose function is to commemorate. The success of “Concord Hymn” then, is directly rooted in Emerson’s own (persuasive) representation of an American identity.
The second stanza of “Concord Hymn” refers to the powerful British empire (the “foe”) long after the battle, and the United States (“the conquerer”), sleeping. Time has passed since the fight occurred, and Emerson suggests that people have forgotten the struggle. “The dark stream which seaward creeps” is an image that suggests the phenomenon of forgetting. It is this memory loss, Emerson implies, that Americans must now fight. Though primarily a poem written to commemorate an historical event, “Concord Hymn” nonetheless embodies Emerson’s own convictions about experience and the role of the poet. A staunch advocate of looking inward for universal truths, Emerson believed that a “true” poet is representative. As someone who had suffered through the early deaths of his father, his young wife, two brothers, and his first son, Emerson knew grief deeply. Urging Americans not to forget the Revolutionary War dead, then, was also a way he used to keep the memory of those he loved alive. That Emerson’s father was himself a preacher in Concord during the Revolutionary War makes the poem all the more poignant.
In the third stanza Emerson describes the bank of the river as “green” and the stream as “soft.” These descriptions stand in contrast to the “ruined” bridge and “creeping” stream of the preceding stanza, because now the victors (Americans) are in the process of remembering. Indeed, the “votive stone” Emerson mentions is in fact carved with the first stanza of “Concord Hymn.” Emerson accomplished quite literally, then, what critic Donald Stauffer claimed, in A Short History of American Poetry, he sought: “a union of nature and spirit through the medium of language, which, if it was succcessful, would equate the word with the object and result in a truly symbolic poem.” This stone commemorates the brave action of the Americans, while the inscribed poem helps Americans to remember what the stone on which it is carved memorializes.
The fourth stanza is a plea to Spirit (for Emerson, a kind of nondenominational God) that made the men brave to preserve the tribute that Emerson and other Americans raised to the dead soldiers. Only if “Time and Nature” spare the monument, Emerson suggests, will humanity remember the dead and the cause for which the soldiers fought. Pleas and invocations are common features of hymns, which historically have denoted songs that celebrate God or express religious sentiment and have been sung at services or ceremonies. However, Emerson used the form to celebrate the human spirit which, for Emerson, was itself divine and to praise the lives of those who died to make America what it is.
The significance of “Concord Hymn” resides in the fact that it commemorates the beginning of the American Revolution and that for a period in American history it became a means by which Americans learned about the Revolution itself as well as the identity of a young nation. Critic Jean Ferguson said that Emerson’s aim as a writer was less to originate a tradition than to produce active readers, who would then refashion themselves and their culture.” “Concord Hymn’s” sustained popularity suggests that he has done just that.
Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.
George Santayana
In the following excerpt, Santayana praises Emerson for his transcendent and independent thought, his love of nature, and his adherence to “natural law.”
The New England on which Emerson opened his eyes was a singular country. It manifested in an acute form something not yet quite extinct in America—the phenomenon of an old soul in a new body.
The inevitable simplicity of the new life was a part of its virtue, and its accidental isolation seemed a symbol of divine election and the harbinger of a new era of righteousness.
But no such pleasing reflections could remove the anomaly of an old soul in a young body, an anomaly much too violent to last. The dogmas which Calvinism had chosen for interpretation were the most sombre and disquieting in the Christian system, those which marked most clearly a broken life and a faith rising out of profound despair. But what profound despair or what broken life could exist in young America to give meaning and truth to those spectral traditions? People who looked and thought for themselves, people who yearned for that deeper sincerity which comes from shaking off verbal habits and making belief a direct expression of instinct and perception, challenged at last their ancestral dream, threw off its incubus, rubbed their eyes, as it were, in the morning light, and sprang into the world of nature.
In no man was this awakening more complete than in Emerson. No one greeted it with greater joy or recognized more quickly his inward affinity to nature rather than to the artificial moral world in which he had been reared. The scales dropped of themselves from his eyes and left his vision as pure and clear as if no sophistications had ever existed in the world. The instinct which took him at one leap into the bosom of reality, and brought him face to face with unbiased experience, is the greatest evidence of his genius, or perhaps we should say, of his simplicity; for he shed the incrustations of time, not by a long and mighty effort of reflection, not by a laborious sympathetic progress through all human illusions; but rather by a native immunity and a repulsion on his part. Other people’s troubles could not adhere to him; he remained like a grain of sand, clean and whole in any environment. This simplicity clarified and disinfected the world for him as only the ripest wisdom could disinfect or clarify it for other men.…
The love of nature was Emerson’s strongest passion; no other influence swayed him so often, stirred him so deeply, or made him so truly a poet. If he regarded any moral or political problem with sympathetic or steady attention, he immediately stated it in terms of some natural analogy and escaped its importunity and finality by imagining what nature, in such a conflict, would pass to next. What seems mysticism in his moral philosophy and baffles the reader who is looking for a moral solution, is nothing but this rooted habit of inattention to what is not natural law, natural progression, natural metamorphosis.…
Emerson’s love of nature was honest and unserved; it was founded on nature’s irresistible charm, grace, power, infinity. It was sincere adoration, self-surrendering devotion; it was not qualified or taken back by any subsumption of nature under human categories, as if after all she were nothing but her children’s instrument, illusion or toy. “Dearest nature,” as he calls her, remained for him always a mother, a fountain not only of inspiration but of life. The spiritual principle he discovered in her was her own spirit, which man, being a bubble in her stream, might well breathe in for a moment and joyfully share; but it was she that the more deeply inspired. She was the mistress and sibyl, he the pupil, the trembling interpreter of her oracles. Firmly, even arrogantly, as Emerson could assert his spiritual freedom in the face of men and human traditions, in nature’s presence he had no transcendental conceit. For this reason his poetry about nature, though fanciful as such poetry may well be, remains always receptive, always studied from life and free from sentimental impertinence.…
All men of letters in the 19th century have been inclined to love and describe nature; but this somewhat novel theme has entered an imagination filled already with other matters, preoccupied, perhaps, with political or religious revolutions. A moral and human substratum, a national and personal idiosyncrasy, has existed in every case and has furnished a background for the new vision of nature; and it makes a great difference in a poet whether behind the naturalist in him there lies, for instance, a theologian, a statesman, or an artist. In Emerson what lay behind the naturalist was in a measure a political thinker, a moralist interested in institutions and manners, a democrat and a Puritan; but chiefly what lay there was a mystic, a moralist athirst for some superhuman and absolute good. The effect of this situation upon his poetry is what remains for us to consider.
“Nothing in all Emerson’s writings is more eloquent and popular than some bits of his patriotic verse.”
Nothing in all Emerson’s writings is more eloquent and popular than some bits of his patriotic verse. There are not only the Concord and Boston hymns, but sparks of the same fire shoot out in other places; for Emerson could not have written so well upon occasion, I may almost say to order, if he had not been full already of the enthusiasm which that occasion demanded. Art or a merely sympathetic imagination never dictated a line to this Puritan bard, who if he was perfectly bland was also absolutely unyielding and self-directed. No force affected him save those which made him up. Freedom, in its various expressions, was his profoundest ideal, and if there was anything which he valued more than the power to push on to what might lie before, it was the power to escape what lay behind. A sense of potentiality and a sense of riddance are, as he might have said, the two poles of liberty. In America both poles were highly magnetic, for here, more than elsewhere, old things had been thrown off and new things were to be expected. Potentiality, cosmic liberty, nature perpetually transforming and recovering her energy, formed his loftiest theme; but the sense of riddance in escaping kings, churches, cities, and eventually self and even humanity, was the nearer and if possible the livelier emotion.
The verses which he devoted to memories of the Revolutionary War and to the agitation against slavery, though brief, are the most thrilling and profound which those themes have yet inspired. Everybody knows of the “embattled farmers” who “fired the shot heard round the world.” Perhaps less present to the younger generation are his stirring lines, in which he denounced slavery and dreamt of the negro’s future.…
And while the master was thus bitterly challenged, the slave was idealized.…
We need not ask whether verses like these have a place in literature: it is certain that they have a place in American history and put vividly before us the passions of a momentous hour.
But Emerson’s love of freedom did not need crying abuses to kindle it to flame; it was a speculative love that attached him to whatever was simple, untrammelled, idyllic in any time or sphere.
[W]hat shall we see in Emerson’s poetic achievement? Briefly this: his verses put together in a more pungent and concentrated form his guiding ideas. They are filled with high thought, enthusiasm, terseness; they contain snatches of lyric beauty.
Source: George Santayana, “Emerson’s Poems Proclaim the Divinity of Nature, With Freedom as His Profoundest Ideal,” in George Santayana’s America: Essays on Literature and Culture, collected and with an introduction by James Ballowe, University of Illinois Press, 1967, pp. 85–95.
Sources
Arnold, Matthew, “Emerson,” in Macmillan’s Magazine, Vol. 50, No. 295, May, 1884, reprinted in his Discourses in America, The Macmillan Company, 1924, pp. 138-208.
Birnbaum, Louis, Red Dawn at Lexington, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1986.
Chapman, John Jay, “Emerson, Sixty Years After,” in the Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 79, January-February, 1897, reprinted as “Emerson” in his Emerson: And Other Essays, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898, pp. 3-108.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, abridged, edited and with an introduction by Robert N. Linscott, New York: The Modern Library, 1969.
Frost, Robert, “On Emerson,” in Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, (copyright 1959 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, MA), Vol. 88, No. 4, Fall, 1959, reprinted in Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Milton R. Kovitz and Stephen E. Whicher, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962, pp. 12-17.
Gross, Robert, The Minutemen and Their World, Hill & Wang, 1976.
Lauter, Paul, ed., The Heath Anthology of American Literature, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
McAleer, John, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter, Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1984.
Stauffer, Donald Barlow, A Short History of American Poetry, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1974.
Whitman, Walt, “Emerson’s Books, (the Shadows of Them),” in The Literary World, Vol. XI, No. 11, May 22, 1880, pp. 177-78.
For Further Study
Duncan, Jeffery L., The Power and Form of Emerson’s Thought, Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1973.
Emerson is one of America’s earliest and best thinkers, and it is likely that his ideas on social duty and on the place of the individual in society and the universe will be studied for as long as the country exists. In this book, Duncan attempts, for the most part successfully, to explain a system that ties all of Emerson’s writings throughout his lifetime together into one coherent system.
Gross, Robert A., The Minutemen and Their World, New York: Hill and Wang, 1976.
The information in this book has been covered extensively in other places, but Gross has a good sense of what the times were like, and he conveys the information in a lively, interesting manner.
Howe, Irving, The American Wilderness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Howe, one of the finest literary critics our country has produced, looks at how all of American society has been influenced by Emerson’s thought. In the three essays collected in this book, all scrupulously detailed with footnotes, he traces a form of intellectualism that appears to have started with Emerson and continues through this day.
Miles, Josephine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1964.
Like all of the pamphlets in this University of Minnesota series, this is a short book (under fifty pages), but it does an excellent job of encapsulating the life and works of this very complex American thinker, covering the high points of his career.
Stokesbury, James L., A Short History of the American Revolution, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991.
The Revolution has been the source of countless books and classes each year, but this book covers the basics that readers of “Concord Hymn” should know in order to gain the poem’s full effect. An historian might find Stokesbury to be shallow and lacking in insight, but for the casual reader, there is plenty in this book to think about.