Old Ironsides

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1830

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

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.

Meter

Because the poet sought a broad audience for his plea to spare the Constitution, and because the poem was targeted to appear in a wide-circulation daily newspaper, the poem forsakes clever and intricate metrical patterns. The poem employs an ear-friendly pattern: alternating lines of eight syllables (iambic tetrameter) and six syllables (iambic trimeter). The iamb itself is a conventional two-beat metrical unit that mimics conversational rhythms: two syllables, the first unstressed, the second stressed. That pattern creates the urgent feel of the poem, the insistent beat mimicking the cadence of a drumbeat.

In addition, the poem uses its metrical pattern to encourage public recitation. The poet provides lines that close with end punctuation and lines that flow into the next line (called enjambment) to encourage creative and dramatic recitation. The poem also uses multiple exclamation points for emphasis and several em dashes to encourage meaningful pause. That consistent inconsistency suggests the waves of the open ocean itself, as does the rhyme scheme. Each stanza maintains its own rhyme scheme. The first stanza, for instance, is ABCBDEFE. The second stanza, however, follows GHGHIJKJ, and the third LMNMOPQP, the same pattern as the first stanza but with different rhymes. That sort of patterned variation in turn suggests the rhythms of the open sea.

Speaker

It is tempting, of course, to identify twentysomething Boston citizen Oliver Wendell Holmes as the speaker in the poem. Keeping in mind Holmes’s familiarity with and respect for British Romantic poetry, particularly William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, however, the speaker is less an identifiable person and more a voice offering wisdom and insight to a reading public. Holmes does not speak as Oliver Wendell Holmes, medical student, Boston aristocrat, and aspiring poet, but as the poet, a public fixture, performing a public service by commenting on Big Issues such as the fate of this iconic American warship.

This, then, is not just Holmes’s outrage. He gives voice to the presumed outrage of a generation of Americans who remember the tipping-point moment when the Constitution not only gave the War of 1812 a purpose and meaning but gifted the American populace, uncertain over the stability and longevity of this American experiment, a cause to rejoice, to take heart, and to feel pride. This is a constructed speaker: Holmes was only three when the Constitution defeated the Guerrière. Thus, this is a poem to be declaimed. The poem’s argument is spiked with dramatic emotional outbursts—the opening “Ay,” for instance, or the handwringing “O” that begins the last stanza, or the four exclamation points—outbursts that do not reward silent, sustained reading but rather beg for public recitation, the speaker rousing the nation to action.