from The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere
Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,–
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
On my last day in Boston you can see that the leaves are only just starting to turn behind this statue of Paul Revere on his midnight ride. We visited the old North Church and really the take home message for the day was that it didn’t happen quite like that. I hate it when it turns out everything I learned in grade school was wrong. But Paul Revere did ride out to warn the patriots that the British were coming and they did (briefly) hang two lanterns in the old North Church when the Brits took off over the Charles River. What else really matters, I ask you? All these subtle nuances are… well, just subtle nuances. What’s sad is that Henry seems to have been actually writing propaganda to get men to enlist to fight in the Civil War. “Don’t you want to be a hero like Paul Revere?” was apparently the point of the poem. Who learned that in grade school? The older I get the more I miss math where the answers were just right or wrong.