20 pages • 40 minutes read
Oliver Wendell HolmesOld Ironsides
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1830A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Tattered Ensign
The opening stanza focuses on the Constitution’s “tattered ensign” (Line 1). The ensign is the national flag flown on the stern, or the back, of a ship. The tattered condition suggests the ship’s long record of courageous sea battles. In speaking to a nation barely 50 years old, the speaker’s impassioned plea to spare the warship is grounded in associating the doomed ship with America itself, to argue that it needs to be spared and returned to its majestic place in the open ocean. Better, the speaker argues, to tear down that ensign in the pitch of battle, signaling defeat in the furious chaos of fighting, than to allow that noble flag to be lowered quietly, ingloriously by shipwrights and carpenters in some North Boston salvage yard.
Thus, the ensign renders the ship a symbol of the courage and defiance of America itself. After all, the ensign establishes the identity of a ship and makes the ship itself a dramatic assertion of cultural integrity, a proud part of the nation itself, however far out into the open ocean it goes. With the long history of the Constitution’s engagements with the British, that flag, the speaker assures, has long occasioned celebration when it comes into sight because it represents American sea power, domination, and, most importantly, the subjugation of the British fleet. If it is to be lowered, the speaker reasons, let it only come down when the last efforts of its captain and crew have failed, when surrender is inevitable, when nothing is left to give.
The Ocean
Against the furious drama of the battle history of the Constitution, detailed with the images of a deck running with blood and the boom of the ship’s cannons, the poet uses the symbol of the open ocean to represent nature, a context broader, wider, and deeper than any one warship, or any one nation for that matter. Like some great heroic figure from mythology whose death occasions, even demands, elaborate funeral rites, the ship, in its demise, must be offered up to nature itself.
The threat comes from the idea of submitting the decommissioned ship to the indignities of being scrapped. The poet argues that the Constitution belongs most fittingly to the ocean itself, that the ship should be allowed to return to duty, allowed to seek out new challenges, new showdowns, and to let the ocean—the rolling waves, the fierce storms, the howling gales—claim it as the only grave sufficiently sublime for such a magnificent ship. Drawing from the transcendent nature poetry of the British Romantics, most notably Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth, Holmes conceives of the ocean as the embodiment of nature as a potent, near-divine energy. That vastness, that sublimity, rather than the shipyards of North Boston, would be the appropriate resting place for such a ship—“there should be her grave” (Line 20).
The Eagle of the Sea
Dubbing the Constitution the “eagle of the sea” (Line 16), a nickname still used for the ship today, originated with Holmes’s poem. In Lines 15 and 16, the poet decries how the “harpies of the shore,” the Navy Department bureaucrats with their bottom-line mentality compared here to voracious, predatory, barely human creatures from mythology, were planning now to pluck the “eagle of the sea.” It seems an odd comparison, the mighty warship to a North American bird of prey not particularly noted for roaming the open seas. Holmes, however, draws on the cultural embrace of the bald eagle as America’s official national bird. Since 1782, when Congress placed the bald eagle on the national seal, the eagle had been associated with America itself, although depictions of the eagle as a noble bird of courage date back to the Romans.
Thus, in plucking the ship, that is, to reassign it to be dismantled so suddenly and so gracelessly, the bean counters in the Navy Department were de facto desecrating America itself. However, pluck has an additional connotation. To pluck is the act of removing feathers from a bird. To pluck the eagle then is to make cruelly ironic its once powerful, majestic flight. Better, the comparison implies, for the graceful bird with its sweeping flight to be killed in the wild, doing what eagles do so gloriously, than to experience the indignity of being ingloriously plucked by indifferent and careless hands. The warship, by implication, also deserves to die, at least metaphorically, nobly and heroically.
