"Paul Revere's Ride": The Quintessential American Poem

“Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.”

These are the opening lines of what is one of the best poems of the greatest American poet: “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This poem is one of the few pieces of literature that always, without fail, brings tears to my eyes as I read it or recite it. I memorized parts of it when I was a child and on the rare occasions when I am asked to pick a poem to read aloud, my choice falls without hesitation on “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

I believe this poem perfectly captures everything that is best about American history and the American spirit. I admit, in some ways, the poem leaves out important historical details—for instance, the fact that Paul Revere was only one messenger who spread the alarm, and was not even the messenger who completed his route (he was captured). What Longfellow did, however, was to capture all the most epic aspects of the true story and add just a touch of the drama that makes it such a compellingly-told tale.

The idea of one man alone against the whole British imperial army; the proud, massive British ship and the professional marching British soldiers, versus ordinary rural Americans roused out of bed by a silversmith to defend their homes with their own private guns. . .this is the perfect illustration of American individualism.

For American individualism, rightly understood, does not mean only that every human life is infinitely precious, but also that every ordinary man (and woman) can and must take action to change his world for the better. It is precisely the “ordinary” American people who achieved the success of the American Revolution. There were instances throughout the Revolution when key events hinged not on groups, but on individuals; not just on Washington the great leader, but on every single man who chose to continue fighting or to press ahead in a battle despite massive odds, starvation, sickness, and defeat. To study the American Revolution, as historian David Hackett Fischer would say, is to study a massive web of individual decisions.

“A hurry of hoofs in a village-street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed that flies fearless and fleet:
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.”

One man can start a revolution. One spark can start a roaring fire. Never hang back from a fight because you are only one—that would be un-American.

There is also the pervading reminder of the reality of death and sacrifice in the poem. Why spend a full stanza speaking about the “churchyard,” where “lay the dead?” And why make nearly half of the stanza about Concord run thus:

“And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.”

Longfellow is emphasizing that winning liberty does not simply involve glory—it involves heroic sacrifice, and death. Freedom is not free. It is only achieved through the shed blood of patriots.

Furthermore, just as religion underlies and holds up American democratic republicanism, just so the Old North Church is the background of this poem’s tale, and the scene for the catalyst that sets Paul Revere off on his ride to preserve liberty. The church is as natural a part of the American landscape as the trees and rivers.

Finally, this poem captures the spirit of American optimism. We have always fundamentally been an optimistic people; that is, we will fight for the right even where there is every reason to believe it is against our material interests. GK Chesterton once said that only unrealistic optimists achieve change for the better, and America was a country founded and preserved by “unrealistic” optimists.

So many American writers, especially the most famous, are thoroughly morbid and pessimistic in outlook (Edgar Allen Poe, Hamlin Garland, and Flannery O’Connor for instance). Longfellow was not. As I noted above, by speaking of the persistent presence of death in the poem, it is not that Longfellow was not intensely aware of the tragedies of life. His greatest poems all include tragedies as key parts of their stories. It is simply that Longfellow’s literature always breathes the American belief that justice will triumph in the end, even if it is not triumphing now, and even if the individual fighter does not live to see it. Greatness will always prevail over mediocrity, even if the ultimate sacrifice is necessary to secure that victory.

George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Nathan Hale, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, George Patton, Ronald Reagan. . .the list could go on of great Americans who deliberately chose to bring trouble, unpopularity, sorrow, and even death upon themselves to achieve liberty and justice for themselves and for all. I believe Longfellow would agree that there is nothing a man with a conviction and self-sacrificing heroism cannot achieve.

We are a people of courage and daring. We are a people who would rather die than submit to tyranny. We are a people of “defiance, and not of fear.” We have only to reawaken the sleeping American spirit to take back our nation from the Marxist tyrants. The echo of Paul Revere’s voice calls us even now.

“So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.”