Old Ironsides by Oliver Wendell Holmes

First published: 1830; collected in Poems, 1836

Type of poem: Dramatic monologue

The Poem

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote “Old Ironsides” in ironic agreement with the news that the famous frigate USS Constitution—nicknamed “Old Ironsides” because of its formidable strength—would soon be demolished. The poem exalts the ship to elegiac status in three octaves (stanzas of eight lines), written in alternating tetrameter and trimeter syllabic accents. Holmes composed the now-famous poem immediately upon reading of the planned demolition in the BostonDaily Advertiser. The report he read, drawn from the New York Journal of Commerce, called for the preservation of the ship.

“Old Ironsides” begins with the word “Ay,” an echo of the traditional “Aye-aye, sir” used by sailors to acknowledge orders from a superior officer. By using “Ay” rather than a simple “Yes,” Holmes sets the tone of the poem, allowing the speaker to appear knowledgeable of sailing matters as well as willing to obey the authority demanding the demolition of the ship. The “Ay” also involves the reader in tacit agreement with the planned demolition. The rest of the line calls upon the destroyers of the ship to tear her “tattered ensign” down. The ensign, or flag, symbolized the power of the United States Navy, especially after “Old Ironsides” defeated the British ship Guerrière in the war of 1812. Holmes also recognizes the length of service the ship had given when he writes of the flag that it had long “waved on high.”

Holmes goes on to describe the joy the ship has created over the years, with “many an eye” dancing to see the ensign waving as a “banner in the sky.” The ensign has overseen battles fought amid shouts and the roar of cannon. Holmes refers respectfully to the ship as a “meteor of the ocean air,” noting that it will no longer “sweep the clouds.” The comparison of the ship with a meteor may have come from Holmes’s own fascination with meteors. In 1830 almost any weather phenomenon or light in the sky would be described as a “meteor,” but Holmes was particularly enamored of comets, writing another poem that same year describing the devastation a comet could bring to earth.

Holmes continues to celebrate the ship’s history of service by portraying the blood of heroes turning the ship’s decks red—amid which the defeated enemy has been forced to kneel. He then enlarges the reader’s view of the ship, placing it among the “hurrying” wind and white waves, a stormy sea that will no longer feel the “tread” of its victory. Holmes uses a reference from classical mythology to describe those who would demolish the ship, calling them “harpies of the shore.” These execrable half-human birds of prey are vile creatures that desire to “pluck” the frigate he characterizes as an ennobled “eagle of the sea.”

Holmes suggests in the last stanza that it would have been better if “Old Ironsides” could have met a more fitting end by being shattered and sunk in the open sea, where she might have a grave in the “mighty deep.” In an extravagant scene he imagines her “holy flag” being nailed to the mast and her worn sails set so that she could sail out into a storm and be given to the lightning and wind, the “god of storms.”

Forms and Devices

Without doubt “Old Ironsides” was composed as a protest, somewhat comparable to a letter to the editor. It is written as a dramatic monologue in which one speaker conveys a persuasive message to all. The poem is also an example of “occasional” poetry—a form in which the poem celebrates or discusses a specific event. Holmes had already established himself as a writer of occasional poems, reading his entertaining verses before audiences at school and publishing them in the Harvard student magazine. In “Old Ironsides” the occasion is the plan to scrap the ship. Holmes wrote to point out the gallant service of the ship to its country and to scorn plans to end her career in an ignoble way.

The meter of the poem is established through alternating lines of four and then three stresses. Holmes, who was a physician as well as a writer and teacher, later suggested that verse stresses may well be in keeping with the individual body’s pulse and respiration, thus accounting for the differences in rhythms and line length used by different poets. “Old Ironsides” is written in a steady rhythm, an appealing quality as illustrated by the popularity of lullabies, rhythmic games, and modern musical forms such as rock and roll and rap. Rhythmic verse is also very much a part of the oral tradition in which long passages of poetry are memorized for recitation.

Rhyme is another appealing poetic element that Holmes uses, in this case adapting a pattern of end-rhyme: ababcdcd. Nonrhyming words also appear in order to maintain meaning and avoid inverted structures. In the first stanza the second and fourth lines end in “sky” and “high” respectively, while the sixth and eighth lines end with “roar” and “more.” Six of the eight lines in the second stanza end in rhyming words: “blood” and “flood,” “foe” and “below,” and “knee” and “sea.” The last stanza is similar to the first, rhyming “wave” with “grave” as well as “sail” and “gale.”

Critics have disparaged “Old Ironsides” for its common imagery—“battle shout,” “cannon’s roar,” and so on. Additional criticism of the poem has labeled it a rhetorical exercise or a work of propaganda. In later collections of his work, Holmes himself relegated “Old Ironsides” to a section he called “Earlier Poems,” in which he explained that its composition had been an “impromptu outburst of feeling.” However, readers still enjoy the imagery of “Old Ironsides,” especially such vivid phrases as “conquered knee” and “red with heroes’ blood.” Readers also respond to the deeply inspiring tone of the poem, especially inasmuch as Holmes never overtly argues for restoring and preserving the ship, the ultimate result he inspired.