State offices, schools, and local businesses throughout Maine and Massachusetts will close on Monday to celebrate Patriots' Day and commemorate the first shots of the American Revolution. Festivities will include historical re-enactments in Lexington and Concord, Mass. where minutemen first met the British army in battle.
Here at Bowdoin, the commemoration of Patriots' Day bears special significance due to the critical role that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Class of 1825, had in romanticizing the revolutionary ride of April 18, 1775. On that day, Paul Revere, a Boston silversmith and member of the Sons of Liberty, a secret group of rebels, received instructions from Dr. Joseph Warren to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams of their impending arrest by a column of British troops marching on Lexington.
Eighty-five years later, war threatened New England once again. On the eve of the Civil War, Longfellow penned a poem called "Paul Revere's Ride" that was not meant to capture the facts of Revere's ride itself, but instead to exaggerate them for social and political purposes. Charles C. Calhoun, a member of the Maine Humanities Council and author of "Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life," wrote in an e-mail to the Orient that, "Longfellow definitely saw himself as a maker of myths." Calhoun was careful to point out, however, that the poet did not mythologize to mislead, but rather, believed that "...a relatively new nation needed its own folktales and legends."
With its assurance that "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," Longfellow's poem tied the New Englanders of the Civil War period to the event that galvanized their patriotic spirit in the struggle for independence. Calhoun wrote that, "Paul Revere's Ride is a shorter work that quickly caught the public imagination in 1860," which Longfellow's contemporaries read "as a Civil War poem, calling the North to arms in a moment of national crisis."
Longfellow's Bowdoin education from 1822 to 1825 prepared him well for his role as a prominent literary figure later in life. The future poet's classmates displayed an intellectual and cultural brilliance rarely seen before or since in the College's history. Longfellow biographer Eric Robertson wrote that, "...there were many young students at Bowdoin destined to shine in later life," such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, who graduated with Longfellow in the Class of 1825, and United States President Franklin Pierce, a member of the Class of 1824.
Although Longfellow returned to Bowdoin as Professor of Modern Languages in 1829, his most remembered work, "Paul Revere's Ride," appeared in the 1860s, a time of exceptional personal prosperity for Longfellow. Longfellow scholars recognize his primacy as an American writer of narrative poetry, and Charles Calhoun said that his ability is "about as good as it gets. In English, his only superiors are Chaucer, Milton, Byron, and Browning," all of whom hailed from Britain itself.
The American public still holds Longfellow's poetry in high regard as well. Even today, readings of "Paul Revere's Ride" figure prominently in Patriots' Day celebrations. In assessing the poem's continuing popularity, Calhoun asked, "How many other poems can so many Americans still recite by heart?" While most would say "Not many," on Patriots' Day, New Englanders remember "a word that shall echo for evermore": Longfellow's rendering of Paul Revere's midnight ride.