Old Ironsides

Although it would be Oliver Wendell Holmes’s oldest son and namesake, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who would have a stellar career as a jurist, ultimately serving for more than 30 years as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, it is the father who here displays the adroit and subtle argument skills of a master lawyer.

Knowing the poem will argue that to destroy the iconic warship Constitution would be to dishonor the place the ship had earned in the annals of American naval history, the speaker begins by demanding that the ship be destroyed, an example of verbal irony: “Ay,” the first line opens, in other words, go ahead and “tear her tattered ensign down!” (Line 1). The exclamation point establishes the energetic counterargument the speaker will pursue in this opening stanza. Go ahead, do what no British man-of-war had been able to do: strike Old Ironsides’s colors. Long has the flag waved “on high” (Line 2), long has it been the inspirational ship for three generations of American sailors who, seeing that same flag approach during an engagement, have been inspired to rise to noble battle. The poem thus appears to offer as evidence in favor of destroying the ship the very same evidence that would suggest destroying the ship would be a mistake. Go ahead, the speaker argues, destroy the greatest and noblest ship in the American navy, “meteor of the ocean air” (Line 7). The speaker seemingly agrees that the price tag to rehab the ship, nearly $3 million in contemporary dollars, makes destroying it only logical. However, by comparing this apparently decrepit hulk to nothing less than a meteor at a time when the sciences still accorded such heavenly bodies a feeling of transcendent awe, the speaker makes exactly the opposite point. In turn, the comparison diminishes the number crunchers in the Navy Department as unable, unwilling, or uninterested in seeing the implications of their decision.

The strategy of counterargument continues into the second stanza. The speaker significantly heightens the irony by focusing on the Constitution’s history of critical victories at sea. To make the case for destroying this ship, the speaker ironically suggests looking at its magnificent record over 40 years of heroic service. The stories that have become the stuff of a nation’s history record the courage of the Constitution’s crew, American “heroes” (Line 9) all, and their victories over “vanquished foes” (Line 10). Certainly, the speaker argues, believing the opposite is true and hoping the reader feels the indignation, such a heroic record of decisive wins justifies dismantling that ship now to save money. The ship that so proudly represented the nation at sea, braving “hurrying” (Line 11) winds and savage waves, and knew only the glory of victory and the pride of the “conquered knee” (Line 14)—that is, the surrender of one British naval officer after another—that ship deserves to be hauled to a shipyard and summarily dismantled.

The speaker overloads the argument in these first two stanzas—they sentimentalize and romanticize the difficult realities of naval life and the complicated dynamics of open-ocean battles to make the argument that at first appeared subtle much more obvious: The ship should not be decommissioned. The speaker then drops the pretense of counterargument in the couplet that closes the second stanza. It is at this moment that the speaker indicates their outrage over the disgrace of the Constitution’s fate, how myopic Navy Department bureaucrats, considering only bottom-line practicality, have decided to “pluck / The eagle of the sea” (Lines 15-16). The speaker reaches back to an image from the monster mythologies of Antiquity to capture the calculating, mercenary insensitivity of these Washington accountants: They are the “harpies of the shore” (Line 15). In both Greek and Roman mythology, harpies were human-like figures, their upper half female, the lower half reptilian and bird-like, with claws for hands and feet. Harpies inhabited nests in caves along roadways. They were much feared for creating havoc with their ability to appear fetching and welcoming, often singing to entice unwary travelers, whom they would then devour. They would seize what goods the hapless travelers carried, but the harpies’ principal satisfaction came from tormenting and consuming.

In characterizing those landbound ledger-dwellers as “harpies” (Line 15), mythological monsters known for being rapacious and blindly predatory, the speaker directly reveals the argument through hyperbolic metaphor: Those who seek to mothball this grand ship are not the coolly logical pragmatists constructing the nation’s new navy but rather terrifyingly feral creatures bent only on pointless destruction. These creatures, the speaker cautions, are intent on destroying this mighty ship, the “eagle of the sea” (Line 16). The juxtaposition of harpies to the eagle—both winged creatures but one nightmarish, the other noble (and distinctly American)—closes Stanza 2 as the speaker at last makes this emotional plea, a pitch for the ship’s preservation uncomplicated by irony.

In the closing stanza, the speaker offers one final argument by answering a philosophical question: how best for a man-of-war ship to meet its final moments? The speaker declares it is better for the ship to “sink beneath the wave” (Line 18), better to end its days in full engagement, doing what a warship is designed to do: fight to the death. The speaker draws on nothing less than the example of the British warship Guerrière that the Constitution defeated off the coast of Nova Scotia in the first months of the War of 1812. That much-feared warship engaged the Constitution, and when the fight proved unwinnable, it was sunk nobly at sea by the American victors.

That, the speaker reminds the readers, is how a warship should end its days: “Her thunders [cannon fire] shook the mighty deep / And there should be her grave” (Lines 19-20). Rather than scuttle the ship in North Boston’s naval scrapyards, set its masts for battle: “Nail to the mast her holy flag” (Line 21), head the ship out to sea, and “give her to the god of storms” (Line 23). If this ship is to die, metaphorically at least, it has earned the right to go with grandeur and dignity, immersed in the very ocean world that it had dominated for so long.