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Paul Revere's Ride
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Symbols & Motifs
The Somerset
If “Paul Revere’s Ride” is a war poem, or at least a right-before-the-war-breaks-out poem, it needs an enemy. No doubt Henry Wadsworth Longfellow intends the courageous figure of the lone rider Paul Revere to embody the plucky American superhero—but the poem still needs an enemy. Technically, the British occupational army, about to swarm Lexington and Concord to arrest prominent colonial insurgents and, along the way, steal the colonists’ gunpowder, is the enemy against which Paul Revere stands; but there is no battlefield showdown, no opportunity to create the dynamic of an enemy presence.
When, in Stanza 2, Paul Revere rows alone under the April moon across the Charles River to his vantage point in Charlestown, he must row past the British warship Somerset already anchored in the harbor. The poem uses the juxtaposition of Paul Revere’s tiny rowboat against the hulking black mass of the warship to symbolize the approaching war for independence that would pit the tiny scratch-army of the nearly united colonies against the most intimidating army the world knew.
Longfellow, however, will not let that disparity create pessimism. As Paul Revere completes his trip across the Charles to await the signal from the belfry tower, the speaker notes that because of the unreliable optics of moonlight, the great hulking man-of-war only appears intimidatingly large. The “black hulk” (Line 22) we are assured, “was magnified / By its own reflection in the tide” (Lines 22-23), thus deflating the pretense of the British forces, a shadow-army in the end too impressed by its own distorted sense of itself.
The Old North Church Graveyard
It is an odd moment as Paul Revere’s compatriot climbs up the belfry steps to signal how the British forces would advance toward Concord and Lexington. The friend is to ensure that Paul Revere secures the news to spread the alarm to warn the colonists about the advancing army. He plays a pivotal role in the night’s plan. Yet even as he ascends up the “trembling ladder” (Line 37) to the belfry, even as he disturbs the pigeons roosting in the rafters, even as he arrives at the belfry window, he pauses and looks down on the church’s cemetery in the “flowing” (Line 41) moonlight.
The speaker lingers on what this friend saw: “the dead” (Line 42) in their tidy rows of tombstones, their “night-encampment” (Line 43) quiet and still with only the “watchful night-wind” (Line 46) to patrol it. As the wind creeps from “tent to tent” (Line 47), that is, between the tombstones, it whispers, “All is well” (Line 48). It is a moment of enchanting distraction, the friend pausing to consider the reality of death, “the secret dread” (Line 50). The churchyard symbolizes how, when a nation is fighting for its very existence, small terrors such as anxieties over death cannot hold sway—duty calls. It is a symbol that would not be lost on Longfellow’s nation, which now faced a similar existential crisis as the Southern states began to secede.
The Meeting-House Windows in Lexington
Longfellow, writing nearly 70 years after the battles of Lexington and Concord, understands what the speaker understands, that the courageous ride of Paul Revere, notwithstanding the generous license of this account, was not the end of the story. Paul Revere, with the network of other freedom fighters, delivers the message, alerts the towns between Boston and Concord of the approaching British army. That alarm, however, makes inevitable the showdown at the Concord bridge the next day, in which more than 50 minutemen would die and another 50 would be wounded, all in defense of a nation that existed only on paper.
From a narrative viewpoint, however, that battle the following afternoon would violate the unity of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. That narrative ends in triumph: After much sacrifice and high risk, the message is delivered. To offer the sobering reminder of the next day, the speaker lingers on the meeting-house windows in Lexington as an exhausted Paul Revere heads into his final stretch. The windows are personified. They appear to “gaze at him with a spectral glare” (Line 98) as if they somehow knew the “bloody work” (Line 99) they would witness the next day. The windows know that soon, even as they sleep soundly in their beds, the men of Lexington and Concord would be “dead by British musket-ball” (Line 110), the first to fall in the fight for independence. This moment of poetic license, then, symbolizes the reality of war and the cost of fighting for ideals.
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