Point of View

"Concord Hymn” is written from the point of view of a figure involved in the formal commemoration of the American Revolutionary war battles of Lexington and Concord six decades removed from the events. Emerson is thus writing essentially from his own situated perspective as a literary figure formally invited to set to the verse the proceedings. This is why, in the third stanza of the poem, as it the verse reaches something of a narrative climax, Emerson employs the first-person plural perspective: “We set today a votive stone;” (10). This explicitly acknowledges the context in which the verse was meant to delivered – as an oral event accompanying the consecration of the obelisk at the site of the battle of Concord.

While Emerson invokes the participants physically at the site of the memorial consecration on the day of the sixty-first anniversary of the battle, April 19th, 1836, he...