"Where swinging wide at her moorings lay / The Somersett, British man-of-war; / A phantom ship, with each mast and spar / Across the moon like a prison bar"
This is a potent symbol of British power and might. It is a large ship that looks even larger and more prominent reflected in the water. It is dark and foreboding, a "phantom ship" and one that broods and watches. It is an occupying force, a brutal menace letting Boston know her days of insubordination are putatively over. Critic Jill Lepore also sees this ship as a reference to slavery in that it evokes a slave ship and the name Somersett would evoke the case, Somerset v. Stewart, that ended slavery in Britain. This is an effective way for Longfellow to allude to the present (1860) while taking on his historical tale.
"By the trembling ladder, steep and tall, / To the highest window in the wall, / Where he paused to listen and look down / A moment on the roofs of the town, / And the moonlight flowing over all"
This is one of the most memorable scenes of the poem. Revere's friend ascends the tower and looks out over a sleepy, silent village complete with a graveyard where the dead sleep permanently. All of the villagers are quiet and for the moment safe; the knowledge of what is about to happen makes this scene all the more stirring. This is a moment of waiting, of expectation; it is the calm before the storm. When Longfellow was writing he also knew he was in a veritable calm before the storm. It was his job, then, to wake everyone up just like Paul Revere would do.
"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."
This is a subtle but powerful image, one that reveals the human costs of war. Longfellow describes the young man who will be first to be killed by the British, who now blithely, peacefully sleeps as Revere rides throughout the land. At this moment, he is a son, perhaps a husband, perhaps a father. He still has a future; his fate seems to be his own. This young man will be one of many casualties to come, and Longfellow is exhorting his readers to acknowledge that the same thing may be happening in 1860.
"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."
In these last stirring lines Longfellow brings the "midnight message" home: we have something to learn from this ride. Revere's ride doesn't just exist in one time and place; it represents all moments in which someone needs to wake up a sleeping populace to the realities of what is happening around them. For Longfellow, it was the imminent Civil War. For contemporary readers, it is something different, but we would do well to remember Longfellow's exhortation to open our eyes and shore up our courage.
