Concord Hymn

“Concord Hymn” is a quasi-war poem. In commemorating the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War, the poem takes pains to set the scene in the opening stanza. The speaker minds history and recreates the April morning when the colonists stopped the British from crossing the Old North Bridge. There is the battle flag unfurling in the April breeze, symbolizing the commitment of the colonists to a cause and gifting their resistance with the dimensions of an ideal. There are the “embattled farmers” (Line 3) themselves, not soldiers but farmers whose stake in the fast-approaching war would be driven by their emotional connection to the land itself. They would not die for a king nor would they be mercenaries for hire. They were fighting for their home. They are “embattled” (Line 3)—not battle-tested but rather patient, even longsuffering, and willing to endure decades of oppressive acts intended to humiliate the colonists and keep the colonies under the British king’s thumb. This war poem climaxes in the closing line of the first stanza when that first shot is fired and the battle, really the war itself, begins.

The poem steps back from recounting what happened after the first shot rang out. We are not given the chaos of the showdown, the rapid fire exchange, the screams of the wounded, or the casualties on both sides. The speaker of the war poem steps back from recounting that reality because the poet, Emerson, at the time a 30-something philosopher, was waging a far more personal, far more dangerous war—that war in the end gifts the poem with its soaring optimistic resolution. Emerson was at war with his Christian God, who had, a scant four years earlier, taken his beautiful young bride, Ellen Louisa Tucker, dead at 20 from tuberculosis. Her death triggered a conflict within Emerson, a promising preacher already assigned to a prestigious congregation in Boston, and it is this conflict that emerges as the subject of the poem’s closing three stanzas.

No longer about the colonists’ fight for independence and their sacrifice that April morning, Emerson infuses that historical moment with his own learned lessons about the hard rush of time and the helplessness humanity feels within its urgent current. Stanza 2 focuses on how the soldiers on both sides of that encounter are long dead, how now they “in silence” sleep (Line 5). Even the original bridge that arched the Concord River has been lost to the steady erosion of weather, nature, and “Time” (Line 7). Everything, the haunted speaker intones, and everyone dies. Supremely the speaker registers his perception of the river itself and how even now, 50 years later, it still follows its steady path to the vastness of the nearby ocean—becoming a symbol of time itself, irresistible and unstoppable, and the vulnerability of humanity, whether friend or foe, neighbor or enemy.

Uneasy, really unwilling to embrace the Christian offer of an afterlife, then, suspicious of such a radiant promise, the speaker in Stanza 3 offers the only consolation he can: the gift of memory, how remembering can salvage moments otherwise lost to the swirling rush of time. We can remember, the speaker argues, a provocative idea given Emerson’s well-documented grief over his dead wife, including his daily five-mile walks to the mausoleum where she was buried; a harrowing visit one night to her coffin months after her death; and his insistence on prying open the lid to see for himself the ravages of her decomposition. The imperative here is to remember, to not let time win. Without the traditional compensation of a luminous Christian afterlife, Emerson celebrates the sheer muscle of memory itself. The battle monument, the “votive stone” (Line 10), will help “redeem” (Line 11) that long-ago moment from cultural forgetfulness. The monument symbolizes the will to remember.

Finally, in the closing stanza, the poet prays to what he terms a universal “Spirit” (Line 13), suggesting a kind of energy field animating the cosmos but without the tacky obligations of Ten Commandments and the rituals of polite worship. The speaker has a personal communication with the Spirit without the intervention or interference of any clergy. He pleads his own case directly to the Spirit, the upcycled version of the Christian God he has all but resolved to abandon as unworkable and capricious. He prays that the monument itself will spare the memory of the heroics of the colonial farmers and make that moment lasting. Here the poet himself resolves his war with God—nothing can bring back the war dead (or his young bride, for that matter), but their lives can be gifted with meaning if we resolve not to forget them. In the face of the agony of time and the inevitability of death, Emerson offers the consolation of remembering, a strategy for celebrating the battle at Concord, as well as the too-premature death of his wife.