Concord Hymn

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1836

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context: Occasional Poems

“Concord Hymn” is an occasional poem—that is, the poet makes clear the poem does not spring from some personal, private, confessional urgencies; rather, it serves to mark a momentous public event. The poet speaks for a community. Many countries, America included, appoint poets to serve as Poet Laureates, whose job it is to write such occasional poems. Occasional verses are compelled by shared emotions and are written in reaction to a specific event or moment that is, in turn, elevated to define the mindset and emotional registry of an entire culture at that specific moment.

Emerson’s poem was commissioned to commemorate the occasion of an event critical to a culture’s history. Court poets have been called on to write such memorial verses since Antiquity to mark state weddings or funerals, the coronation of a monarch, a great victory or catastrophic loss on the battlefield, or some large-scale natural disaster. These verses resist elaborate or ornamental language devices—they deal in direct and reader-friendly expression and are designed most often to be read or proclaimed publicly.

Occasional poems most often leave their deepest emotional mark on the generation experiencing the event itself—often when such poems become canonical, they inevitably come with footnotes to explain to later generations the historic occasion itself. In Emerson’s own time, examples of occasional poems that have become iconic are Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854), memorializing a disastrous British military operation during the Crimean War; Walt Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain” (1865), expressing the national trauma over the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; and Bayard Taylor’s “National Ode” (1876), celebrating American ingenuity, commissioned as part of America’s Centennial Celebration of 1876. As such, these poems mark a profound connection between the real-time culture and its poets, notoriously closeted and apart, and reveal how poets can, in turn, give voice to the emotions of a people.

Historical Context: The Battles of Lexington and Concord

“Concord Hymn” is as much about how history comes to be shaped as it is about the actual historic event it commemorates. The initial idea of dedicating a monument at the site of the Old North Bridge outside Concord was proposed in connection with the battle’s 50th anniversary in 1825. That proposal sparked what became more than a decade of squabbling between the towns of Concord and Lexington for the right to claim to be the first battle of the Revolutionary War. Given that the encounters with British troops in the neighboring towns were part of the same British strategy for quickly ending the insurgency of the American colonists, and given that the two battles were within hours of each other, the squabbling reflected each town’s desire to be located at the genesis moment of the American Revolution, to be where that “shot heard round the world” (Line 4) was actually fired. The confrontation at Lexington Green between the Minutemen and the British, in which seven Americans were killed, occurred the day before the showdown at the Old North Bridge, where the same British detachments were coming into Concord to steal the colonists’ gunpowder stored there.

In addition, the different committees set up in Concord to direct the battle memorial could not agree on where to put the monument. Because the original site of the Old North Bridge—itself long gone—was still private property, the committee moved to locate the monument in town. That created a storm of controversy over the historic integrity of the memorial site. Even when the actual historic site was offered to the town, controversy still raged over the inscription of the monument describing the showdown at the bridge as the first forcible resistance to the British. In all, these negotiations delayed the dedication for more than 10 years.

In the long run, Emerson’s aspirational poem, sung by locals on the day of the memorial’s dedication, helped make Concord the birthplace of the American Revolution, if not in history books, then in the public imagination.