Paul Revere's Ride

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1861

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

“Paul Revere’s Ride” is a ballad, a story in verse. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow structures the poem as a told-narrative, introducing in the first stanza a fictitious speaker who, long after Revere’s ride, shares the dramatic story with listeners in a tavern or inn. In the closing stanza, the speaker returns and gives the story of the midnight ride a historical context that would appeal to his listeners.

The poem invites dramatic recitation. The form is irregular to match the spontaneous immediacy and emotional feeling of a told-story meant to enthrall the tavern patrons. The poem is divided into 14 stanzas. Stanza length is irregular; the shortest is the five-line prologue and the longest, at 16 lines, is Stanza 7, which describes Paul Revere impatiently awaiting the signal from the North Church belfry. Most of the stanzas, however, average 8-10 lines. This sort of irregular/regular quick-cut form creates the feeling of a storyteller giving life to the narrative. The stanzas break where the action breaks, thus using the form to create the feeling of rising action and breathless pauses appropriate to a told-story.

Meter

A scholar of languages with a keen ear for the sonic impact of words as well an impeccable feel for reader-friendly prosody, Longfellow uses a tight metrical structure that both enhances the feeling of immediacy of a told-story and helps create the urgent hurry of Paul Revere’s horse as he rides through the Massachusetts night.

Mimicking the ballads of wandering minstrels in Medieval Europe, Longfellow’s steady beat and the tight rhyming patterns lend the poem to memorization and recitation, as generations of New England schoolchildren could attest. The rhyme scheme is at once constant and easy to hear and yet subtle, even intricate in its patterning given the poem’s different stanza lengths. Thus, the rhyming patterns never demand attention or distract from the action but subtly give the poem a reader-friendly aural effect. Each stanza defines its own rhyme scheme. Stanza 3, for instance, follows AABBCCCDD, while Stanza 7 follows AABABCCCCCDDEEFEF.

The beat is easy to hear: Each of the poem’s 110 lines contains four iambs, that is, four clusters of two-beat units, the first beat unstressed, the second stressed, a sonic beat that matches the natural rhythms of spoken English (and the cadence of a hurrying horse). Longfellow allows the beat to engage rather than distract by using enjambment, a device in which the poet does not give a line closing punctuation that would give the line a natural pause—a comma, for instance, or even a period. Rather, the line’s idea is completed only by moving smoothly to the next line, thus giving the recitation an organic rather than imposed rhythm, appropriate to a storyteller engaging patrons in a tavern.

Voice

Only by reading the collection of poems in which “Paul Revere’s Ride” appeared in 1863 (See: Background) can the character of the poem’s speaker be defined. In Tales of a Wayside Inn, the full profile of the speaker emerges as the inn’s landlord, who steps up to tell the story of Paul Revere. The innkeeper addresses the tavern’s convivial and much younger (and most likely drunk) patrons, whom he derisively calls “children” (Line 1). In fact, in that collection, “Paul Revere’s Ride” is retitled “The Landlord’s Tale.” Given that speaker dynamic, the poem is Longfellow’s attempt to inspire patriotic pride in a generation now going to war who did not remember the heroism of the War for American Independence.