Today’s Poem: Old Ironsides

The harpies of the shore shall pluck / The eagle of the sea! — Revisiting Oliver Wendell Holmes for Independence Day weekend

Michele Felice Corné, The USS Constitution, 1803 (USS Constitution Museum)

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Old Ironsides

by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
   Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
   That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
   And burst the cannon’s roar; —
The meteor of the ocean air
   Shall sweep the clouds no more!

Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood
   Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood
   And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
   Or know the conquered knee; —
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
   The eagle of the sea!

O, better that her shattered hulk
   Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
   And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
   Set every thread-bare sail,
And give her to the god of storms, —
   The lightning and the gale!

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Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. saved the USS Constitution. A Boston newspaper article claimed (possibly wrongly) that the ship — nicknamed Old Ironsides for her battles in the War of 1812 — was due to be broken up and sold off for scrap. And two days later, on September 16, 1830, Holmes published “Old Ironsides,” his poem bemoaning the fate of the once-famous ship: The harpies of the shore shall pluck / The eagle of the sea.

Here at Poems Ancient and Modern, we’ve covered a good number of poems by the Fireside poets — the 19th-century authors of metrically solid and easily memorized public poetry. These were America’s literary establishment: the ones who resided in the Parnassus of New England and set the tone for the nation’s literary taste. Their poems were in every schoolbook, every anthology, every fine-press edition of America’s proudly declared native work. Everyone knew them, and everyone recited them. The 20th-century turn against Victorian poetry was, in America, essentially a turn against them.

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892), Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809–1894), and James Russell Lowell (1819–1891): Just to list their triple-barrelled names is to be set again around the parlor table, playing a hand of that old Authors card game.

So here, for the Fourth of July tomorrow, we revisit Holmes’s “Old Ironsides.” Now the world’s oldest commissioned naval warship still in service, the three-masted, 56-gun frigate was launched in 1797. Successful in the First Barbary War, she reached her apex in the War of 1812, defeating five British warships: HMS Guerriere, Java, Pictou, Cyane, and Levant.

In “Old Ironsides,” Holmes calls for a more fitting end for the storied ship than a scrapyard: O, better that her shattered hulk / Should sink beneath the wave, the last stanza sighs. Give her to the god of storms, — / The lightning and the gale!

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (Wikimedia Commons)

Of course, the poem had the opposite effect, as Holmes wanted. A national outcry led to a saving of the ship (although, after its many refits and restorations in the years since, the USS Constitution has become something like a modern Ship of Theseus).

The poem’s three eight-line stanzas are each essentially two stacked quatrains, rhymed abcbdefe, in ballad meter, alternating four-foot unrhymed lines with three-foot rhymed lines. (Someday, we need to spend a little time noodling about the punctuation stacks that typesetting used to allow. Every modern proofreader would eliminate them, but I find myself drawn to the emdashes-after-commas-and-whatnot that Holmes indulges: “the cannon’s roar; —” and “the god of storms, —”.)

The effect of Holmes’s versifying is something easily recitable and easily memorized. And it builds — as the Fireside poets often intended — the patriotic scaffolding of literature the nation could use on such occasions as Independence Day. That’s the point of public poetry, isn’t it?

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