Concord Hymn

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1836

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Votive Stone

Everything in the poem moves, everything is fluid—the flag in the breeze, the river, the open sea, even the original bridge itself. Everything is in the chaos of motion, everything except the monument itself. The poem centers on the monument being dedicated, a massive 25-foot shaft built of four separate pieces of granite topped with the imposing obelisk. Amid the whirling universe that so intrigued Emerson the philosopher, that monument offers a fixed and stable center point, an unmovable assertion of permanence.

The monument symbolizes for the poet the promise that the heroics of the colonists will not be forgotten. Against the “rude bridge” (Line 1) that washed away years earlier, the stone suggests durability, heroic permanence, and, in turn, the culture’s commitment to not let that sacrifice, those deaths, slip into obscurity. The poet is aware of the raw energy of time and the potential ruin of nature—he marks both in the closing stanza—and sees the great monument as an assertion of defiance as grand and as meaningful as the stand made by the colonists themselves. The stone will secure that the deeds of the Old North Bridge will be redeemed—rescued from the rush of time and the threat of neglect—when, like the generation who fought the Revolutionary War, Emerson’s own generation and those generations to come are gone.

The Shot Heard Round the World

It is a truism of history that every revolution, every war, every battle begins with a single shot, a moment, usually lost in the chaos of what so quickly follows, when anger becomes action, when discontent becomes strategy, when theory becomes reality, and death suddenly, baldly becomes an option.

The speaker describes the New England farmers who stood against the approaching British Redcoats as “embattled” (Line 3), tested by years of oppression and tyrannical behavior, pushed beyond the limits of reason, and ready now for their simmering emotion to resolve itself into action. The phrase “the shot heard round the world” (Line 4) is hyperbole, of course, but the dramatic notion suggests what the speaker, writing nearly a half century later, believes was the historic impact of America’s decision to throw off British rule, a gesture of independence unprecedented in the annals of nearly two centuries of European colonial expansionism. Indeed, the cause seemed hopelessly naive, hopelessly romantic—that farmers and blacksmiths could stand up against the greatest standing army in the world. At that tipping-point moment, that shot—and history does not record which side actually commenced the encounter, which side fired first, nor does history record the motivation behind that first gunshot, whether it was fired in anger, fear, courage, panic, or patriotism—the single gunshot transformed oppressed British colonists into traitors and in turn created something entirely new, something called Americans.

The River

The Concord River, the “dark stream which seaward creeps” (Line 8), runs through the poem with an unnerving constancy. It is as if we join the Concord faithful who gathered there along the “green bank” (Line 9) of the river that Independence Day in 1837. The rush and careless plash of the river provides the poem its subtle soundtrack as it did during the ceremony on that July morning.

The river is always moving, always rushing to the open ocean, and thus a symbol for Emerson as philosopher of the terrifyingly steady movement of time itself. As a rouge Christian who, in 1837 at the time the poem was composed, was just beginning to sort through the implications of his emerging doubts about the vitality and relevance of an institutional church that seemed bankrupt of spiritual energy, the most daunting and implacable foe was time.

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After all, the reassuring framework of a Christian Creator-God endowed the crazy chaos of ordinary living with meaning and purpose and promised the committed pilgrim-Christian that this sad and sorrowful journey through life’s ups and downs would be rewarded, that death was not an end but rather a portal into the radiant immediacy of timelessness, the promise of eternity. If the Christian God seemed unworkable, even irrelevant, then time became a formidable hobgoblin. After all, the speaker notes time has already destroyed the original bridge, showing no respect for the historic value of the structure. And the speaker understands that without the stone monument, the sacrifice of these first-generation Americans would too easily be lost in time. The poem thus juxtaposes the firmness and stability of the stone monument against the hard current of the river, memory inspired and determined to resist the pull of time.