Redemption

The motif of redemption emerges most explicitly in the third stanza of the poem: “On this green bank, by this soft stream, / We set today a votive stone; / That memory may their deed redeem, / When, like our sires, our sons are gone” (9-12). Redemption in this context is not a matter of excusing past sin, but rather of fulfilling the promise at the heart of the insurgency in the colonial era. Redemption of the lives lost in the war is possible, Emerson suggests, if the memory of sacrifice for liberty is upheld in the present and in succeeding generations.

Redemption is an intergenerational process according to Emerson’s explication of historical memory. It is bound up in symbolic markers of remembrance. Consecrating specific sites redeems the sacrifices and heroic actions that took place at such places. This is precisely why Emerson describes the washing away of...