Concord Hymn

"Concord Hymn" is a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson written in 1837 for the dedication of an obelisk in Concord, Massachusetts, commemorating the battle of Concord, one of the clashes of April 19, 1775 that opened the American Revolutionary War. Its original title was "Hymn: Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument, April 19, 1836," although the monument was actually dedicated on July 4, 1837, Independence Day.

Emerson had moved to Concord in 1834, to a house less than a hundred paces from the site of the battle, and soon became one of the town's leading citizens. The Battle Monument Committee commissioned the text. It was first read at the Independence Day celebration and then sung by a local choir to the familiar tune "Old Hundredth." Emerson's personal ties to the event may have shaped the poem, since his grandfather William Emerson had witnessed the fighting at the North Bridge.

The poem raises the battle above a simple military event and makes Concord a spiritual center of the nation. It leaves out the particulars of the fighting and instead celebrates a general spirit of revolution and freedom that Emerson hoped would outlive those who fought. Its line "the shot heard round the world" became a fixture of popular lore about the Revolution, and the opening stanza is inscribed beneath Daniel Chester French's statue The Minute Man.

The poem established Emerson as a poet, since he had previously been known mainly as a lecturer and essayist. It was republished as the last poem in his first collection of verse, and his biographer Robert D. Richardson notes that these lines are arguably the most famous he ever wrote.