Concord Hymn

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1836

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Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Nature of Heroism

The first stanza, before Emerson begins his disquisition into the nature of time and the dynamics of historical memory, focuses on the ragtag contingent of some 300 colonial soldiers who met the British determined not to let them occupy Concord and pilfer the precious supply of gunpowder stored in the town. At the center of Emerson’s commemoration of the shots fired at the Old North Bridge is the nature of heroism itself. After all, the American forces were hardly an army. The colonists who stood their ground at the bridge were at best loosely trained soldiers, more valuable for their enthusiasm and their idealism than for their military discipline or marksmanship.

They were artisans from Concord, farmers from along the river, lawyers and physicians, teenagers still finishing school. Armed with squirrel guns, they were willing to stand up to a detachment from the finest trained army in the world, willing to die for their country, a country that did not even exist yet, indeed whose declaration of political independence would not even be drafted for another year. They were willing to sacrifice their livelihood, their very lives, for an idea. Unfurling that flag in that April breeze was tantamount to an act of treason. That sort of courage appealed to Emerson, who believed that the material universe meant little without a spiritual dimension, that a person had to be more than organic materials. And history of course does not record which side actually fired first, who actually “fired the shot heard round the world” (Line 4), but for Emerson the military encounter at Concord set in motion a revolution that would end forever Britain’s right to occupy North America and would in turn give rise to what became the United States of America.

The Complex Dynamic of Remembering

Although the poem opens with a conventional patriotic feeling that hails the courage of the Massachusetts militia and the world-altering moment when that first shot was fired, as the poem unfolds, the argument turns decidedly more philosophical. Emerson ponders the reality of how quickly and how absolutely the achievements, military or otherwise, of one generation blur in a kind of self-validating, self-sustaining cultural amnesia.

It is a measure of Emerson’s perspicacity that contemporary readers must often google the Battle of Concord, uncertain what it was or why it was important, much less see any connection between those farmers at the bridge and the contemporary reality of the American republic. The poet, living just 50 years after the battle, understands the quirky, even fickle dynamic of a culture’s memory. The third stanza makes clear the poet’s fear and how he sees the poem and the towering monument itself as a way to keep the tipping-point moment at the Old North Bridge part of the American memory. We set this votive stone today, he says, so that “memory may their deed redeem / When, like our sires, our sons are gone” (Lines 11-12). Those who actually remember the battle, Emerson knows, are dying off. When those who remember are gone, Emerson fears, all that will be left of that sense of their courage and sacrifice will be a 25-foot shaft of granite. For Emerson the American, the enemy is clearly the well-drilled Redcoats and their military superiority and their cultural arrogance; for Emerson the philosopher, the enemy is how too quickly, too easily, the heroism and sacrifice of one generation can be forgotten by the next.

The Implacable Force of Time

Emerson’s poem mentions “Time” (Lines 7, 15) twice, both times capitalizing it to underscore the nature of its power. First the speaker notes how the original Old North Bridge, the site of the actual battle, long ago deteriorated and collapsed into the Concord River, flowing out into the Atlantic, a dark suggestion of the sheer immensity of time. The poem closes with the speaker’s ardent plea to the Spirit that animates the cosmos to now allow Time its power, to “gently spare” (Line 15) the monument, to allow it to stand and, in turn, to tell the story of this heroic American moment.

Too much a philosopher, too aware of the hoary ruins of great civilizations and how cultures rise and fall with sobering alacrity, Emerson positions himself as a supplicant, pleading with the Spirit that animates the universe to temper Time, to allow this historic moment to withstand the implacable force that has rendered ironic every civilization since the Egyptians. To allow Concord to be the exception to the reality of Time is perhaps foolish and naive and may even be expressed by Emerson ironically. He perhaps knows the showdown at Concord will go the way of the grand battles at Kadesh or Actium, Carrhae or Changping, other world-changing, tipping-point battles lost in time and now reduced to trivia questions against time’s implacable movement.