Paul Revere's Ride

“Paul Revere’s Ride” is a quasi-historical account that fuses fact and fiction. Months before composing the poem, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited sites in Boston critical to its colonial history, including the Old North Church. Longfellow wrote in his journal, after climbing the church’s tower, that “[f]rom this tower were hung the lanterns as a signal that the British troops had left Boston for Concord” (“Paul Revere’s Ride.” National Park Service. 2020). Longfellow then studied the historical accounts of the battles at Lexington and Concord. However, he found bare mention of the Boston silversmith.

Yet the poem is no paean to a forgotten colonial hero. Longfellow knew there was no dramatic hoisting of signal lamps in the tower to alert a waiting Paul Revere, that Revere was just one of many colonial freedom fighters spreading the warning that night, and that Revere had been arrested during that night by British troops. What compels Longfellow in his free recreation of the historical figure of Paul Revere is identical to what compels his fictional character: the need to awaken a slumbering population about an imminent threat to their freedom. As Paul Revere rides through the night stirring colonists from a literal sleep, Longfellow addresses a nation now 75 years past the war for independence, a nation lulled into a symbolic sleep, a false security that was to be shattered by Southern secession. Stirred by a heroic voice (Revere’s or Longfellow’s), the “people will waken and listen to hear” (Line 128) symbolically the cadence of Paul Revere’s “hurrying hoof-beats” (Line 129) and realize the time is now, the threat is here.

The poem is a frame narrative. The first and last stanzas introduce a fictitious speaker, an innkeeper, who tells the story to a gathering at a country inn, younger folks with little memory of America’s fight for independence. Those patrons represent Longfellow’s own nation, complacent and unaware of the terrifying prospect of a war that could end the grand dream of Revere’s generation.

The narrative contrasts two figures: Paul Revere’s nameless friend, who dominates Stanzas 2-6, and Paul Revere himself, who dominates Stanzas 7-12. Given the dramatic shift in perspective between Stanzas 6 and 7, the poem becomes a two-act drama. Stanzas 2-6 follow the friend as he moves through Boston to the North Church and then ascends to the belfry tower. Before he sends the signal to Paul Revere waiting across the harbor in Charlestown, the friend meditates on the existential implications of the church’s graveyard, pondering the rows of tombstones bone-white in the spring moon.

That pause defines these opening stanzas. It is not the time, the speaker understands, for philosophical ruminations. The poem in these stanzas is suffused with gloomy images, shadowy streets, dark belfry chambers, a churchyard “wrapped in silence so deep and still” (Line 44). Above all, as the friend moves through the Boston streets, there is the oppressive threat of British regulars already stationed in the city, already heading to the boats, the “grenadiers / Marching down to their boats on the shore” (Lines 29-30). The effect is unsettling and moves the friend to despairing thoughts, even as he struggles up the ladder. His ruminations about the churchyard are full of dread and doubt and affirm his negativity. He feels the “spell / Of the place and the hour” (Lines 49-50), feels kinship with the dead. This, the speaker cautions, is how not to win a revolution. This is hardly the posture appropriate for a nation being called to defend itself, to fight for what it stands for. The only things this friend will rouse are the pigeons roosting in the belfry tower. Appropriately he is never given a name—left in obscurity.

The narrative pivots on the word “[m]eanwhile” in Line 57. Immediately the action shifts to, well, action. Paul Revere is eager, impatient, “booted and spurred” (Line 58). Given the signal at last, he “springs” into action (Line 70) in a furious “hurry of hoofs” (Line 73).

Unlike his friend meditating on the implications of mortality, Paul Revere rides with a cocky self-assurance and a heroic determination as, stanza by stanza, he moves through the sleeping villages. That fiery determination is underscored by the flying hooves of Paul Revere’s horse, which the speaker compares to a “spark” that kindles the very “land into flame” (Line 80). The speaker brings the story to life with detailing—the soft give of the sand, the barking of a farmer’s dog, a weathervane bathed in moonlight, and the “twitter” (Line 104) of birds in the early morning. But nothing slows down the relentless momentum of the midnight ride itself, not even the speaker’s acknowledgment as Paul Revere rides into Concord that his message would waken minutemen who later that day would die at the bridge, the “first to fall” (Line 108).

The closing two stanzas reintroduce the speaker and allow Longfellow to make his pitch to awaken his own population to the war just starting (thus the poem’s free mix of past and present tenses). This is no time for talk, the speaker urges. This is no time for fear. It is time to wake up, time to hear. The speaker, addressing the inn patrons, becomes like Paul Revere, like Longfellow himself, a voice championing defiance and promising hope.