Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn,” occasioned by the 1837 dedication of the monument commemorating the 1775 Battle of Concord (Massachusetts), has become a landmark in American literature. The poem, sung at the monument’s dedication ceremony to the familiar tune of the Protestant “Old 100th” hymn, known more familiarly as “All People That on Earth Do Dwell,” captures that fragile tipping-point moment when the radical idea of an independent America stopped being a theory, with the first musket exchange between the colonists and the British in what would become a long and very bloody Revolutionary War. The poem contains one of the most familiar (and most often quoted) phrases in the canon of American poetry—“the shot heard round the world” (Line 4).

More than just a patriotic celebration of the courage and resilience of America’s earliest Greatest Generation, however, the poem allowed a young Emerson, already an accomplished philosopher fascinated by the problematic nature of a material universe in an age drifting from the comforting anchorage of a Creator-God, to ponder greater questions about the dynamics of memory itself, specifically how effortlessly history, even its most monumental moments, can be lost in the irresistible movements of time. The poem, in turn, becomes a kind of prayer as the poet expresses the fervent hope that the importance of the military showdown at Concord’s Old North Bridge will resist such erasure and become an integral part of the national consciousness, generation to generation, as permanent as the imposing 25-foot granite monument itself.

Poet Biography

Born in 1803 into an illustrious New England family whose ancestry dated back to the Puritans and whose patriarchs had served as clergy in Boston’s Unitarian Church for generations, Ralph Waldo Emerson trained early on to take his place in that influential line. In addition to his commitment to the study of divinity, however, Emerson, born just four years after the death of George Washington, took a broad perspective on his fledgling nation, boldly endorsing a new kind of literature, a new way of thinking and writing to match his young nation’s radical experiment in democratic government.

By the time Emerson matriculated at Harvard to study divinity in 1817, he had already begun to write original verse. He explored his own questionings into the construction of a material universe if God became an article of faith rather than a concrete reality. Ordained into the Unitarian ministry in 1829, Emerson quickly earned a reputation for thoughtful and probing sermons. But the death of his young wife from tuberculosis just two years later commenced what would become a life journey into the rich possibilities of doubt as he interrogated the entire belief system of Christianity, replacing it with a wider perception of a universe driven by a principle of good that charged every element of that material universe with a radiant spiritual and moral energy independent of the control of any institutional religion. In 1832, barely 30, Emerson resigned his pastoral appointment.

Over the next two decades, Emerson emerged as America’s most read and most controversial philosopher. His essays and poetry on the nature of the soul, the reality of the spirit, the potential of America to produce an entirely new sort of artist, and the essential moral integrity of every person—commencing with the 1836 publication of his essay Nature—electrified a younger generation of writers, among them Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Taking their cue from Emerson’s own writings, they dubbed themselves the Transcendentalists and produced in the years leading up to the Civil War revolutionary manifestos that explored Emerson’s visionary ideas of a single grand moral cosmos operating without an interfering God or a vested clergy. Emerson saw such institutions as failures, bankrupt of spiritual energy. Drawing on his own investigations into the idealism first expressed in Antiquity in the writings of Plato, Emerson challenged his generation to embrace self-sufficiency and self-reliance as guides to a moral life.

In postbellum America, Emerson, known now as the Sage of Concord, remained his nation’s most respected voice, sought after by not only America’s new generation of writers but also by Europe’s most respected intellectuals. He became a fixture well into his sixties of the so-called Lyceum circuit, in which reformers, intellectuals, and writers would travel town to town along the Northeast corridor and perform to sold-out audiences. Emerson remained engaged in his writings right up to his death in 1882 at the age of 78. Amid a vast crowd of mourners, Emerson was buried in Concord, Massachusetts, at the modest Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, a public cemetery associated with no religion, beneath a great uncarved boulder of rose quartz, symbolizing Emerson’s unflagging respect for the limitless spiritual integrity and dense beauty of the material universe.

Poem Text

Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

   Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood

   And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;

   Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;

And Time the ruined bridge has swept

   Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,

   We set today a votive stone;

That memory may their deed redeem,

   When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare

   To die, and leave their children free,

Bid Time and Nature gently spare

   The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Concord Hymn.” 1837. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

“Concord Hymn” was commissioned by the Battle Monument Committee of the village of Concord, Massachusetts, to be read on July 4, 1837, at the dedication ceremony for the monument commemorating the military showdown on April 19, 1775, between American Minutemen—mostly loosely trained farmers and tradesmen—and British redcoats that signaled the start of the Revolutionary War. The poem opens by acknowledging the dedication ceremony itself. The reader gathers as the colonists did decades earlier “by the rude bridge” (Line 1) that crosses the Concord River, the historic site of the Old North Bridge itself, where on that spring day more than 50 years earlier “the embattled farmers” (Line 3), really not even an organized army yet, took their stand. In opening fire on British troops, this scratch army fired “the shot heard round the world” (Line 4), an indication of the magnitude of the moment, how that first shot marked the beginning of an entirely new era in world history itself.

In the second stanza, the poet acknowledges the passage of time. In the 50 years since that military confrontation, both the British and the American troops who clashed there have long since passed away and now sleep in silence. Even the original Old North Bridge itself, “rude” (Line 1), as in crudely built, weathered away over time and has been “swept / Down the dark stream” (Lines 7-8) and on out into the Atlantic, replaced by the sturdier structure that now arches the river.

The third stanza returns to the 1837 dedication ceremony itself. All is quiet now along the Concord River. On “this green bank” (Line 9), the town erects a “votive stone” (Line 10), a memorial to consecrate the heroic showdown so that the brave deeds of those colonists would never dim. The poet sees the marble monument as a way to ensure that the memory of those courageous Americans and the sacrifice they made will not be lost when the present generation and, in turn, the next generation die off. It is important, the poet urges, for Americans to remember what happened at the Old North Bridge.

In the closing stanza, the speaker steps entirely away from the dedication ceremony to address the Spirit that animates the wider cosmos (not God, as Emerson was in the midst of a crisis of faith of his own). It was that Spirit that inspired those colonists to take on the daunting challenge of defeating the army of the British empire so that they would “leave their children free” (Line 14). The poet begs that munificent Spirit to spare this monument, this “shaft” (Line 16), from the corrosive effects of time and nature and thus permit the courage of the Minutemen to become a permanent part of America’s collective memory.