20 pages • 40 minutes read
Oliver Wendell HolmesOld Ironsides
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1830A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Definition of American Identity
Oliver Wendell Holmes was born too late to remember the heroic War for American Independence and too young to be called to military service in 1812. Yet when he got wind of the Navy’s plans to scrap the USS Constitution, his reaction was immediate and visceral. He dashed off his homage to the doomed battleship in just two nights, that urgency revealing the depth of his reaction to its planned demise, even though he was too young even to remember the ship’s most storied days.
For Holmes, the demise of the storied ship raised a critical question: What did it mean to be an American? For Holmes’s generation, that is, the first generation born as something called Americans, the iconic battleship embodied what were fast becoming elements of the American identity: courage, endurance, pluck, defiance, in-your-face bravado and esprit de corps, and, above all else, the willingness to take on impossible odds and triumph.
In the poem, the warship transcends into the larger-than-life. Holmes gifts the ship with the epic, his poetic license freely indulging hyperbole and exaggeration—its flags swept the very clouds, its prow defied the ocean’s most terrifying waves, its “thunder,” that is, the ship’s cannon fire, shook the “mighty deep” (Line 19), exceeding even the potent energy of the ocean itself. In celebrating the American warship in such lofty eloquence, calling it “the meteor of the ocean air” (Line 7), Holmes’s paean to the ship suggests that the elements of the ship’s heroic war experiences translate into a personification of America itself, the frigate a floating embodiment of American identity. Much as later generations would come to regard other grand objects as embodiments of the heroic elements of the American character—for instance, Robert Fulton’s Clermont (the world’s first successful steamboat), Chicago’s Home Insurance Building (the first modern skyscraper), Henry Ford’s Model T (the first mass-affordable car), or NASA’s Apollo Lunar Module (responsible for the first and only successful crewed moon landings)—Holmes gifts his young nation with a concrete realization of what it means to be American and proud.
Patriotism and Pride in the Military
Since antiquity, national literatures have sung the praises of the military, soldiers and generals whose battles become epics, their heroes god-like, their victories and defeats tipping-point moments. Although not himself a veteran, Holmes pulls no punches when he celebrates the military resume of Old Ironsides. He details the ship’s deck “red with heroes’ blood” (Line 9) and later the shattering boom of the ship’s 55 massive cannons that “shook the mighty deep” (Line 19). Much like “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the poem hastily scribbled by Baltimore attorney Francis Scott Key while he witnessed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, a poem that in turn became the national anthem, Holmes draws a direct connection between American pride and the strength and character of its military, particularly if victory is earned when the odds are stacked against it.
For all the eloquent speeches, intricately argued political manifestoes, and incendiary broadsides it generated, the American Revolution was a military, not rhetorical, victory. Unconventional as the colonists’ military strategies proved to be, they won the surrender at Yorktown and then, 30 years later, earned the complicated ceasefire of the War of 1812, establishing American dominance over the British Empire and what had been at that point the most feared military machine in the world. For Holmes, the first generation born after the surrender at Yorktown, the American military, whether on land or sea, had become an integral element of American pride. The realities of war—sacrifice, bloodshed, chaos, carnage—were all elements rooted in the emerging sense of American pride. The poem deals frankly and unapologetically, even romantically, with the dynamics of military engagements, the epic drama between the “conquerors” and the “vanquished.” Although the logic would be morally tested by the xenophobic arguments of Manifest Destiny and then by the cannibal logic of the Civil War, Holmes here elevates military might to the stuff of legend.
The Call for a Hero’s Death
Much of “Old Ironsides” revolves around a young man’s contemplation on what kind of death would most befit a hero, even in the form of a ship. In the end, the speaker calls for a departure that the British Romantics, whom Holmes so greatly admired, would endorse: a dramatic death out in the elements, where “the god of storms, / The lightning and the gale” (Lines 23-24) could give the ship the noble, meaningful ending it deserves.
The period of Romanticism in art, which took place largely between 1800 and 1850, was characterized by an emphasis on the individual, emotion over logic, the beauty and power of nature, and, in some circles, Hellenism, a reverence for Greek culture, art, mythology, and tragedy, especially present in the works of Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The poem “Old Ironsides” strikes a Romantic chord by highlighting the ship’s individual greatness and triumphs, appealing to the emotions and nostalgia of its readers and listeners, referencing the destructive forces of nature, and making its own allusions to Greek myth and tragedy by likening the ship’s decommissioners to “harpies” (Line 15) and calling for a warrior’s ending for the ship, rather than a dishonorable retirement.
In championing the cause not merely to save the Constitution from being dismantled for parts but to return the warship to the open ocean and let it die there as a warship should, in a thundering round of cannon fire before sinking heroically into the “mighty deep” (Line 19), Holmes creates a kind of rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light inspirational message. Let the grand ship die as it lived, in the teeth of some fearsome fight in the open ocean—there, the speaker argues, “should be her grave” (Line 20). For a young poet, that call for heroic un-retirement is as much an aspirational message; death is a certainty, but surrendering to death is not an option.
