Paul Revere's Ride The Supernatural Quotes

In this description of the Somerset, a British warship, Longfellow really hypes up the scary Halloween angle.  The basic point here is that the British and their army are scary.  They're here to intimidate and oppress the colonists, and their navy is one way they keep the colonies in a symbolic prison.  Of course, the real story was more complicated, but this ghost-story image of the phantom ship gives us a pretty good idea of who the bad guys are.

This is a sort of cool little side story tucked inside the bigger story.  All Longfellow has to say here is that Paul's buddy went up to the top of the tower and hung up two lanterns.  Instead, he gives us twenty-five lines (one-fifth of the poem!) that describe the look and feel of that climb.  A big part of that description is imagining the graveyard down below coming to life.  This night is so strange that the dead in their graves become a kind of sleeping army. The speaker hypnotizes us with this tale of the ghosts that haunt Boston almost just to show off his ability to create a mood.

Then, all of a sudden, Paul's friend snaps out of it, and we do too.  We remember that there's work to be done here, that we came to learn about Paul Revere, not get wrapped up in a ghost story.   We're not sure why the poem went off this way.  You could cut it out and not lose any plot, but the poem would feel less rich and exciting and strange.  Part of the fun of the poem is its almost movie-like quality.  You feel and hear and see so many different things in a little over a hundred lines.

Another reminder of the tower of the church and the ghosts that live around it.  By calling the tower "spectral," our speaker puts the theme of the supernatural back into the poem.  He doesn't bring a lot of attention to this theme, but it gives this poem that kind of haunted feel.  It creates a little tingle in your spine that keeps you absorbed, even if you don't quite realize it's there.

Even after we leave the church and the graveyard, ghosts keep popping up.  Not real ghosts, in this case, but you can see how the windows of the town make for a spooky, blank face.  The whole world, in fact, feels a little bit haunted in this poem.  That's one of the things we really like about "Paul Revere's Ride."  It tells a simple story, but it does it in a complicated way.  It gives us a history lesson without being a textbook-style download of information.