Old Ironsides

Oliver Wendell Holmes was born too late to remember the heroic War for American Independence and too young to be called to military service in 1812. Yet when he got wind of the Navy’s plans to scrap the USS Constitution, his reaction was immediate and visceral. He dashed off his homage to the doomed battleship in just two nights, that urgency revealing the depth of his reaction to its planned demise, even though he was too young even to remember the ship’s most storied days.

For Holmes, the demise of the storied ship raised a critical question: What did it mean to be an American? For Holmes’s generation, that is, the first generation born as something called Americans, the iconic battleship embodied what were fast becoming elements of the American identity: courage, endurance, pluck, defiance, in-your-face bravado and esprit de corps, and, above all else, the willingness to take on impossible odds and triumph.

In the poem, the warship transcends into the larger-than-life. Holmes gifts the ship with the epic, his poetic license freely indulging hyperbole and exaggeration—its flags swept the very clouds, its prow defied the ocean’s most terrifying waves, its “thunder,” that is, the ship’s cannon fire, shook the “mighty deep” (Line 19), exceeding even the potent energy of the ocean itself.