Summary
The speaker, a landlord, tells a group of gathered friends the tale of Paul Revere and his famous midnight ride of April 18th, 1775.
Revere tells his friend to hang a lantern in the belfry of the Old North Church and to signal with one lamp if the British are coming by land and two if coming by sea. He will be on the opposite shore and will ride and spread the alarm in the countryside. He tells his friend goodnight and departs, silently rowing across the river. The moon rises and illuminates the Somerset, a British man-of-war ship. The ship is dark and ominous, its reflection gleaming larger than life in the water.
Revere’s friend anxiously walks through the streets until he hears men’s footsteps and the sound of arms; the British are marching down to their boats. He carefully and stealthily climbs to the tower of the church, startling the pigeons along the way. High above the town he looks down, noticing how the moonlight illuminates the churchyard. It is so quiet he imagines he can hear the wind whispering “All is well.” A creeping feeling of dread and loneliness, brought about by the “place and the hour” and by knowledge of what is about to happen, descends upon him.
Across the river Paul Revere is ready to ride. He eagerly watches the belfry tower and finally sees a gleam of light. He prepares to take off and sees another lamp burning. He moves quickly, sparks flying from under his steed and enflaming the land he traverses.
He crosses into Medford just after midnight. The fog is thick, and a dog barks in the distance. By one he has galloped into Lexington, the blank windows of the meeting-house ominous and spectral. By two he is in Concord. It is almost morning and he can hear birds and feel the breath of the breeze. The person who will die first, killed by a British musketball, is still asleep in his bed.
The narrator tells us we know the rest: we know about the farmers fighting the British Regulars, firing and reloading and chasing them off.
Paul Revere rode through the night and gave the cry of alarm—a cry of “defiance and not of fear”—and knocked on doors. He flew on the wind of the Past, and in every hour of darkness we have now his horse’s hoofbeats and his “midnight message” still echo.
Analysis
This is a poem whose outsized reputation makes it difficult to encounter with fresh eyes. Not only is it Longfellow’s most famous work,it is one of the most famous of any American poems. It has been recited by schoolchildren for over a century, and has been referenced publicly by people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Gerald Ford. It has also been savaged by critics who find much of Longfellow’s work cloying, saccharine, and simplistic. This does a disservice to the poem, though, and its reputation has been improving of late due to new critical work on how it was a rallying cry for abolitionism and support for the Union as the Civil War broke out.
To understand this poem, we should begin by noting that it is not historically accurate. Revere was not the only rider; Samuel Prescott and William Dawes also rode that night. He was rowed across the Charles River by two other men and never saw the signal lantern. Revere never made it to Concord but was captured and freed in Lexington without his horse. Longfellow was not simply ignorant of historical detail, however. His goal was not accuracy; rather, he wanted to create an American hero and a legend, and to use that hero and legend to connect to his contemporary events. He evokes and shapes national memory in a profoundly impactful way.
Longfellow was familiar with Revere’s own account of what had happened that night. It begins with “From these movements, we expected something serious was [to] be transacted. On Tuesday evening, the 18th, it was observed, that a number of Soldiers were marching towards the bottom of the Common. About 10 o'clock, Dr. Warren Sent in great haste for me, and begged that I would immediately Set off for Lexington, where Messrs. Hancock & Adams were, and acquaint them of the Movement, and that it was thought they were the objets.” The poet follows the account for a while but then begins to deviate from it.
In terms of the poem’s function as an antislavery document, Longfellow threaded it with clues. As critic Jill Lepore points out in her seminal article on the poem, “the name Somerset would have readily called to mind the landmark 1772 Somerset case, which outlawed slavery in Britain. And here the ‘phantom ship’ conjures something more. It is as dark and haunting as a slave ship—a dominant conceit in abolitionist writing.” Also, Revere’s friend in the poem gazes out at the burying ground, which Lepore notes “was far better known as the place where Boston’s blacks were buried.” She concludes her article by stating that the poem “is about waking the dead. The dead are Northerners, roused to war. But the dead are also the enslaved, entombed in slavery.”
One of Longfellow’s skills in the poem is contrasting the quiet, patient but tense imagery and mood of the first part of the poem with the hurried, feverish tone and imagery of the latter part. The friend stalks the silent streets, waiting to hear the boots and boats of the British. All is spectral and still, the man expectant and hushed. When the muffled sounds of soldiers and boats reveal themselves, the reader is already on the edge of their seat. The feeling of calm before a storm, of a held breath, is relinquished when Paul Revere jumps on his steed and like a “spark” rides into the night. Longfellow writes of his “galloping,” his “hurrying hoof beats” and his “cry of defiance and not of fear.” It is as if Revere is always riding, always warning—especially now on the eve of civil war.
As critic Jane Donahue Eberwein points out, the motif of time figures strongly into this dichotomy of Revere and his friend: “First, there is the landlord's perspective on history—the interval between the events of the revolution and memories of Longfellow's contemporaries. Then there is the psychological disparity in sense of time between the friend's savoring of the last moments of peace and Revere's eagerness to jump into action. More obviously, his progress in the night ride is marked by village clocks counting off the hours between midnight and two in Medford, Lexington, and Concord.”
