Old Ironsides

In late summer 1830, as part of ambitious plans by the administration of Andrew Jackson to modernize the young nation’s growing naval fleet, US Navy Secretary John Branch quietly floated the idea of decommissioning the warship USS Constitution, one of the nation’s oldest ships, in service since 1797, nicknamed “Old Ironsides” because of its durability and strength. The ship would find a most unlikely defender in a twentysomething Harvard premed student named Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes himself was all of three years old when the Constitution achieved its greatest victories during the War of 1812, including a stunning victory over the British man-of-war Guerrière, a victory so unexpected that it became a national rallying cry during the first difficult months of the war. Holmes understood that sense of pride. Outraged over the ignominy of demolishing an element of the American character and an expression of its national identity, Holmes dashed off the poem “Old Ironsides” in two nights.

The poem first appeared in September 1830, in the Boston Daily Advertiser, the city’s oldest and most widely circulated daily newspaper. With its lofty patriotic feel and sculpted lines with rich, sonorous gravitas that rewarded dramatic recitation, the poem not only catapulted the young Holmes into cultural prominence throughout New England but triggered a national campaign that successfully kept the Constitution in service. More than celebrating the historic achievements of one of the Navy’s most storied ships, however, the poem reflects the struggle among the first generation of Americans not born British subjects to define a national identity. Ultimately, in the tradition of the British Romantic poetry that Holmes admired, the poem issues a passionate call for the ship to receive a hero’s death out in the extreme forces of nature.

Poet Biography

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to privilege, his family among the most respected and influential families in New England (he was related on his maternal side to Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet). Holmes’s father was an admired Congregational minister and a widely published historian on New England Puritanism. Holmes grew up in an environment of culture and learning. Educated in private schools, gifted in both the arts and sciences, when Holmes matriculated at Harvard, he was conflicted on whether to pursue a career in poetry or the law or medicine. He received a BA in literature and language in 1829. He began writing original verse and found immediate success for his poetry, which drew on British models but investigated American topics. It was during this time that he found unexpected acclaim for his poem “Old Ironsides.”

Holmes opted for a career in medicine, admiring the breakthrough work being done in the field of hospital care in Europe, particularly in Paris. He received his medical degree in 1836 from Harvard. Although he dedicated enormous energy to his medical work, Holmes found increasing popularity from his poetry, which he published in the pages of The Atlantic, a monthly magazine that Holmes helped found. His poetry reflected his admiration for the British Romantic concept of finding in nature inspirational moral messages. “The Chambered Nautilus” (1838), for instance, one of Holmes’s most popular verses, used the sea creature that so patiently, methodically creates its own protective shell as an emblem for the soul’s growth while engaging life’s troubles and challenges.

However, it was as an essayist that Holmes found his greatest celebrity. Begun as a regular feature in The Atlantic, his essays treated contemporary subjects in religion and politics often with withering satire. Many of the essays would close with an original poem reflecting the topic. For instance, his controversial 1858 essay dissecting the collapse of Calvinism in New England culture ended with a witty allegory he titled “The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay.” In it, he used a perfectly crafted carriage that eventually deteriorated into uselessness as a symbol for religion’s growing inefficacy. The poem took on a life of its own and became one of the most familiar poems of the era. The collection of Holmes’s essays The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858) quickly became indispensable reading throughout New England. Two later volumes proved equally successful.

A distinguished professor of medicine and anatomy at first Harvard and then Dartmouth, Holmes pioneered work in medical care, leading critical reformation movements that improved hospital care in America, and pioneered research in the burgeoning field of epidemiology. All the while, Holmes established a position among the most celebrated literary figures of his era, many of whom resided around the Boston area. These self-styled “Boston Brahmins” (a term Holmes himself coined, Brahmins being a Hindu class of spiritual teachers and philosophers) dedicated themselves to becoming the representatives of a distinctly American literature. Their essays and poetry, drawing on British models but treating American subjects, were widely circulated, read in homes and studied in classrooms. These writers, among them Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Greenleaf Whittier, were dubbed the Fireside Poets, recognizing their cultural influence and the reach of their poetry, their books becoming fixtures in the parlors and sitting rooms across New England.

At his death in Cambridge on October 7, 1894, at the age of 85, Holmes was celebrated as postbellum America’s defining Renaissance figure, the breadth and range of his achievements in both the arts and sciences earning comparisons to Benjamin Franklin.

Poem text

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!  

   Long has it waved on high, 

And many an eye has danced to see 

   That banner in the sky;  

Beneath it rung the battle shout,

   And burst the cannon’s roar;—  

The meteor of the ocean air  

   Shall sweep the clouds no more!  

Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood

   Where knelt the vanquished foe,  

When winds were hurrying o’er the flood

   And waves were white below, 

No more shall feel the victor’s tread,

   Or know the conquered knee;— 

The harpies of the shore shall pluck  

   The eagle of the sea!  

O, better that her shattered hulk 

   Should sink beneath the wave; 

Her thunders shook the mighty deep,

   And there should be her grave; 

Nail to the mast her holy flag, 

   Set every thread-bare sail, 

And give her to the god of storms,—

   The lightning and the gale! 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “Old Ironsides.” 1830. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

In the opening stanza, the speaker appears to agree with the Navy’s decision to scuttle the USS Constitution after so long and so heroic a career: “Ay, tear her tattered ensign down” (Line 1). Drawing down the naval flag (the “ensign”) from a warship’s main mast traditionally signaled the end of the fight, the surrender, reluctant but inevitable, to overwhelming forces. The speaker, conceding the decision, takes some satisfaction in recalling the ship’s storied career, how its flag has “long […] waved on high” (Line 2). The speaker adds that, given the ship’s hard-earned reputation for fierce engagements, sighting its flag, “that banner in the sky” (Line 4), had long given heart to three generations of American sailors who took pride in the ship’s resolute spirit to never surrender despite the fierce engagements, the chaos of battle, and the bursts of “the cannon’s roar” (Line 6). The stanza closes with a moment of bittersweet reflection: The career of Old Ironsides is at an end, the speaker reflects; this feared man-of-war, this “meteor of the ocean air” (Line 7), shall sail no more.

In Stanza 2, the speaker, however, alters perspective and begins to make clear their outrage over the decision. The speaker recalls the ship’s glorious career, how the blood of American heroes stained the ship’s deck, how vanquished British officers dropped to bended knee on that same deck to offer up their surrender. The speaker summons a lofty image of the ship plowing through the open ocean, powerful, defiant, and heroic, and notes how the same deck that knew such triumph will no longer “feel the victor’s tread” (Line 13). Instead, “the harpies of the shore” (Line 15)—half female, half bird-like creatures from Greek and Roman myth—will tear it apart bit by bit, reducing “the eagle of the sea” (Line 16), the speaker’s exalted title for the ship, to nothingness.

That idea then stirs the speaker, now indignant, to a new line of argument. Old Ironsides has long served its nation, but to allow such a grand and magnificent expression of the American spirit to undergo the indignity of being dismantled piece by piece and sold off for profit is not in keeping with the ship’s heroic narrative. Better, the speaker argues, to allow the ship to maintain its status as a warship and let it die, as it were, in battle, amid the glorious thunder of engagement, befitting the ship’s acclaimed past. Better, the speaker argues, to return the ship to the sea: “Better that her shattered hulk / Should sink beneath the wave” (Lines 17-18). Better the ship closes its career intact, in the ocean itself. Its cannons shook the “mighty deep” (Line 19), the speaker says, and there, not amid the tacky docks of some New England shipyard, should be “her grave” (Line 20). There, perhaps in battle, going down fighting, flags flying high and proud, can the Constitution meet a fitting heroic ending. The speaker exhorts the listener to give this mighty ship over to the ocean itself, to “the god of storms / The lightning and the gale” (Lines 23-24).