Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular poet in American history.
His work commanded a readership that is almost unimaginable today
even for best-selling novels. In terms of their reach and influence,
Longfellow's poems resembled studio-era Hollywood films: they
were popular works of art enjoyed by huge, diverse audiences that
crossed all social classes and age groups. Writing in a period
before the electronic media usurped the serious literary artist's
role as society's story-teller, Longfellow did as much as any
author or politician of his time to shape the way nineteenth-century
Americans saw themselves, their nation, and their past. At a crucial
time in American historyjust as the Revolutionary War receded
from living memory and the disastrous Civil War inexorably approachedLongfellow
created the national myths for which his new and still unstoried
country hungered. His poems gave his contemporaries the words,
images, myths, and heroes by which they explained America to one
another and themselves. There is no better example of Longfellow's
genius at creating meaningful and enduring national myth than
"Paul Revere's Ride."
The
opening lines of "Paul Revere's Ride" are still so famous
that even people who have not read the entire poem often know
them by heart. They have become, in fact, so familiar that most
readers might easily take them for granted and miss the striking
and paradoxical rhetorical figures they contain. The poem's narrator,
for example, begins by saying, "Listen, my children, and you shall
hear." He addresses the tale specifically to children, and yet
the work is not in any narrow sense a children's poem. "Paul Revere's
Ride" was published in The Atlantic Monthly, hardly a juvenile
journal, and was eventually collected in Longfellow's masterful
book of interwoven narrative poems, Tales of a Wayside Inn
(1863), where it is spoken by the Landlord to an audience
of adult men. Why then does the poem begin by addressing only
one part of its intended audience?
By
invoking children in the opening line of his patriotic poem, Longfellow
implicitly defines his narrative as a story the older generation
considers important enough to pass down to posterity. What will
follow, therefore, is not merely an interesting story but a legacyone
of the traditional tales that defines both the audience and the
speaker's identity. Perhaps for this reason, Longfellow placed
"Paul Revere's Ride" as the first story told in Tales of a
Wayside Inn. The characters in the book meet and tell their
tales at a tavern in Sudbury, Massachusetts, not far from Boston.
Revere's historical exploits would have been a proud part of their
shared local lore.
Longfellow's
inclusion of the date in the third line serves a similar rhetorical
function. (Once again the familiarity of the opening lines makes
us forget how odd it is to present a complete dateday, month,
and yearin a poem. Longfellow never did so elsewhere in
his poetry.) The implicit message of the line is clear: Paul Revere's
achievements were of such singular importance that we must learn
the date by heart and teach it to posterity. Everyone in Longfellow's
original audience would have understood the significance of the
date. April 18, 1775 was the day before the American Revolution
began. The next morning at Lexington and Concord, the American
colonists would fire their "shot heard round the world" and initiate
their successful armed resistance against the British Empire.
The narrator also explains the necessity of passing this piece
of heritage on by reminding the listeners that "hardly a man is
now alive / who remembers that famous day and year." The original
witnesses are now mostly dead. It has become the audience's responsibility
to preserve the memory of Revere's heroic deeds.
Longfellow
was an immensely versatile poet who excelled at virtually every
form and genre from the epic to the sonnet. No form, however,
better displayed his distinctive gifts than the short narrative
poem. Nineteenth century readers greatly esteemed the form, which
combines the narrative pleasures of fiction with the verbal music
of verse. Modern critics, however, have generally downgraded narrative
poetry in favor of lyric verse. Longfellow's reputation has been
especially hard hit by the change in critical consensus, and once
popular poems like "Paul Revere's Ride" have consequently disappeared
from academic anthologies. The special qualities of these poems
seem antithetical to the lyric traditions of modern poetry, which
prize verbal compression, intellectual complexity, elliptical
style, and self-referential movement. Longfellow's greatest gifts
were best suited to more public poetryforceful clarity,
evocative simplicity, emotional directness, and a genius for memorable
(indeed often unforgettable) phrasing.
William
Butler Yeats once commented that Longfellow's popularity came
because "he tells his story or idea so that one needs nothing
but his verses to understand it." That observation particularly
applies to "Paul Revere's Ride," which takes a complicated historical
incident embedded in the politics of Revolutionary America and
retells it with narrative clarity, emotional power, and masterful
pacing. From the poem's first publication, historians have complained
that Longfellow distorted the actual incident and put far too
much emphasis on Revere's individual role. But Longfellow was
not interested in scholarly precision; he wanted to create a stirring
patriotic myth. In the process he took Paul Revere, a regional
folk hero hardly known outside Massachusetts, and turned him into
a national icon. To accomplish this feat, Longfellow mythologized
both the incident and the man. The new Revere became the symbolic
figure who awakens America to fight for freedom. The actual incident,
a literal call to arms for the Revolution, required less mythologization.
After all, revolutions are already the stuff of myth. Longfellow
had only to streamline the historical narrative so that the poem
could focus on a central heroic figure. The resulting storydespite
the scholarly complaintsis actually not too far from fact.
(Longfellow took considerably fewer liberties than Shakespeare
did with British history.) The final poem does not merely recount
an historical incident; it dramatizes unconquerable Yankee individuality
against the old order of European despotism.
Longfellow
was a master of narrative pacing. His description of Revere's
friend climbing the Old North Church tower displays the poet's
ability to make each narrative moment matter. By slowing down
the plot at this crucial moment, Longfellow not only builds suspense;
he also adds evocative physical details that heightens the moods.
(Decades later Hollywood would discover the same procedures.)
Reaching the belfry, the friend startles "the pigeons from their
perch." Fluttering around in they make "masses and moving shapes
of shade." The man now pauses to look down at the graves that
surrounded an eighteenth century churchan image that perhaps,
prefigures the deadly battle to be fought the next day. This lyric
moment of reflection provides a false sense of calm before the
explosive action that will follow. The man now remembers the task
at hand. There is a crucial deed to do.
The
scene now shifts suddenlywith a decisive cinematic cutto
the opposite shore where the solitary Revere waits for the signal.
(What other nineteenth-century American poet would have handled
this transition so boldly?) The historical Revere was one of many
riders, but Longfellow understood the powerful appeal of the single
heroic individual who fights oppression and makes a decisive impact
another narrative lesson not lost on Hollywood. Longfellow's
Revere is not a revolutionary organizer; he is a man of action.
As soon as he sees the first lantern, he springs into the saddle,
though he is smart enough to wait for the second light before
he rides off.
The
rest of the poem is pure actionmostly one long tableau of
Revere's ride from village to town to village. Once again the
effect, to a modern reader, is quintissentially cinematic. Longfellow's
galloping triple meters create a thrilling sense of speed, and
the rhetorical device of stating the time of night when Revere
enters each village adds a cumulative feeling of the rider's urgency.
Few poets could sustain a single, linear action for nearly forty
lines as Longfellow manages so compellingly in the poem's extended
climax. The last two stanzas also demonstrate Longfellow's narrative
authority. As the poet makes the sudden but clear transition from
Revere's arrival in the town of Concord to the following day's
conflict, Longfellow masterfully summarizes the Battle of Concord
in only eight lines. Once again, however, he rhetorically conscripts
the listener to collaborate in completing the story. "You know
the rest," says the narrator, "In the books you have read." Ingeniously,
Longfellow acknowledges the importance of the next day's battle
without accepting the artistic necessity to describe it in detail.
The
final stanza returns to the image of Revere riding through the
night. Now presented outside of the strictly linear chronology
that has hitherto characterized the poem, the galloping Revere
acquires an overtly symbolic quality. He is no longer the historical
figure awakening the Middlesex villages and farms. He has become
a timeless emblem of American courage and independence. Significantly,
the verb tenses in the final stanza shift from the past (rode)
in the opening five lines to the future tense (shall echo,
will waken) in the closing lines. The relevance of Longfellow's
patriotic symbol would not have been lost on the poet's original
audiencethe mostly New England Yankee readers of the Boston-based
Atlantic Monthly. Although Longfellow ostensibly mythologizes
the Revolutionary War, his poem addresses a more immediate crisisthe
impending break-up of the Union. Published a few months before
the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter initiated America's bloodiest
war, "Paul Revere's Ride" was Longfellow's reminder to New Englanders
of the courage their ancestors demonstrated in forming the Union.
Another "hour of darkness and peril and need," the poem's closing
lines implicitly warn, now draws near. The author's intentions
were overtly politicalto build public resolve to fight slavery
and protect the Unionbut he embodied his message in a poem
compellingly told in purely narrative terms. Longfellow's "Paul
Revere's Ride" was so successful that modern readers no longer
remember it as a poem but as a national legend. Underneath the
myth, however, a fine poem waits to be rediscovered.