Everything in the poem moves, everything is fluid—the flag in the breeze, the river, the open sea, even the original bridge itself. Everything is in the chaos of motion, everything except the monument itself. The poem centers on the monument being dedicated, a massive 25-foot shaft built of four separate pieces of granite topped with the imposing obelisk. Amid the whirling universe that so intrigued Emerson the philosopher, that monument offers a fixed and stable center point, an unmovable assertion of permanence.

The monument symbolizes for the poet the promise that the heroics of the colonists will not be forgotten. Against the “rude bridge” (Line 1) that washed away years earlier, the stone suggests durability, heroic permanence, and, in turn, the culture’s commitment to not let that sacrifice, those deaths, slip into obscurity. The poet is aware of the raw energy of time and the potential ruin of nature—he marks both in the closing stanza—and sees the great monument as an assertion of defiance as grand and as meaningful as the stand made by the colonists themselves. The stone will secure that the deeds of the Old North Bridge will be redeemed—rescued from the rush of time and the threat of neglect—when, like the generation who fought the Revolutionary War, Emerson’s own generation and those generations to come are gone.