Old Ironsides

Holmes, long a student of British poetry, advocated for American poetry to pay homage to that tradition by fitting American subjects and themes to inherited, or British, forms. Thus, Holmes maintains a tight, clean form in “Old Ironsides”: three stanzas of eight lines each, called octaves. The octave was a familiar element in British prosody, most familiar as part of the sonnet tradition. The sonnet is a 14-line poem in which the opening eight lines form a single unit, most often laying out the emotional dilemma the poet explores, and the losing six lines, a sestet, propose a solution or examine the long-term implications of an unresolvable dilemma.

Keeping in mind that young Holmes was using the poem to generate public outrage over the proposal to scuttle the warship, Holmes could not afford to appear manic or emotionally excessive, despite appealing to emotion throughout the poem. Thus, by using the octave form, he creates a stabilizing structure that instills confidence in the poem’s arguments. That the poet uses the octave—which conventionally proposed the problem—and does not invoke the sestet—which conventionally proposed the solution—leaves the solution implicitly up to the now-outraged reader.