Concord Hymn

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1836

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

Emerson designed the poem for public consumption, designed it for accessibility—the poem’s form is direct and clear and reader-friendly. The form is inviting, recalling the standard form of a Christian hymn: four quatrains, four stanzas of four lines each, with alternating lines brought in two spaces. That recurring design suggests stability and permanence. That simple and elegant architecture gives the poem a kind of integrity that suggests the votive stone itself.

The form then is strikingly columnar, set in the page with a kind of massive there-ness. The poet resists intricate or original formal experimentation. It is helpful to compare Emerson’s stately engraved-in-stone formal structure to two other of his contemporary poets that have also come to define Emerson’s century: the playful eccentricities of Emily Dickinson’s subtly musical lyrics, and the brawling and careless yawp of Walt Whitman’s cascading catalogues and the manic energy of his boldly irregular lines. Such flighty and idiosyncratic designs distract and inevitably position the poet at the center of the creative process. Emerson stands apart and allows the form itself to put the attention where he believes it belongs: on the heroics of the Concord militia itself.

Meter

The key to the meter is contained in Emerson’s subtitle: The poem was introduced as a hymn, sung to the familiar tune of the Protestant “Old 100th” hymn, known familiarly by its first line, “All People That on Earth Do Dwell.” Accounts of the dedication ceremony record that the poem was printed on sheets of four-inch by six-inch paper and then distributed to those who came to the ceremony, and, at the appropriate moment, the entire gathering sang the poem to the familiar melody.

The poem’s meter—16 lines of tight and unwavering iambic tetrameter (that is, each line contains four two-beat units, with the syllable stress on the second beat)—can be tapped out by a metronome. But the poem permits gracious interpretation and resists the harsh sing-song feel expected when the meter is so carefully followed. First, the poem uses enjambment, completing a thought with two lines, thus making any stop at the end of the line disruptive. Lines 3, 7, 13, and 15 offer this subtle break in metric regularity.

Furthermore, the poem uses vowel and consonant sounds to create variations in meter. The poem uses a sibilant S in Lines 5 and 6 to suggest the soft repose of death (“since in silence slept / Alike the conqueror silent sleeps” [Lines 5-6]). The poem uses a long E and, again, a sibilant S in Lines 11 and 12 to suggest the passage of time that took the colonists and that will, inevitably, take Emerson’s generation (“That memory may their deed redeem, / When, like our sires, our sons are gone” [Lines 11-12]). The closing stanza that offers the poet’s hope that the sacrifice at the Old North Bridge will not fade from memory plays sibilant S and long vowels (I and E) against the harsh chop of D and T to capture sonically that sense of the conflict between memory and time:

Spirit, that made those heroes dare

To die, and leave their children free,

Bid Time and Nature gently spare

The shaft we raise to them and thee (Lines 13-16).

Voice

Because a young Emerson, just at the beginning of his long celebrity, was approached by the committee overseeing the dedication ceremony to write an occasional poem for the ceremony, the speaker is inevitably identified as Emerson himself, a second-generation American, a New Englander proud of his region’s position in the great revolution that secured American independence. The ceremony, taking place more than a half century after the colonists’ brave stand against the British soldiers, itself testifies to the importance of that moment. People are standing there, dedicating this monument, Emerson argues, because of that heroic moment.

The voice, however, shifts emphasis as the poem unfolds. The voice is at once proud and humble, assertive and pleading, confident and riven with doubt. At one level, the poet speaks as a New Englander, a newly coined American, proud of the battle that the monument and this ceremony celebrated. But the speaker is also a philosopher (and a wounded widower) and cannot ignore the larger dynamics of time and how humanity’s most seemingly important moments, titanic in their implication, can be erased by the implacable rush of time. Given the implications of this sobering realization, in the closing stanza the proud New Englander morphs into a humbler philosopher petitioning the “Spirit” (Line 13) that inspired those colonists to take a stand and die for the cause of freedom to now interdict time itself, to allow this historic moment that secured freedom for them and for their children to be the exception, to resist such erasure.