On July 4, 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) delivered an invited poem at the inauguration of the Battle Monument at Concord, Massachusetts — fifty-one years after the Fourth of July issuing of the Declaration of Independence and fifty-two years after the Massachusetts minutemen opened fire on British troops at Lexington and Concord.

Only in the context of the small-scale rebellions before 1776 was it much of a battle. On April 19, 1775, the British, marching from Boston to confiscate the militia weapons stored at Concord, first encountered resistance at Lexington, which they easily overcame. But a smaller group of redcoats, the first to arrive at Concord, about seven miles from Lexington, were stopped at the North Bridge and forced to retreat until reinforced. Soon, however, the British did sweep into Concord, where they found that weapons had already been removed from the armory and hidden.

The Battle Monument—a 25-foot memorial, in the form of an obelisk atop an extended base—was intended to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution, but town politics (and squabbles with Lexington over priority) led to delays. The gain of the late celebration, however, was that the American Transcendentalist Emerson was allowed to write Today’s Poem of the Day: “Concord Hymn,” with its phrase that caught the national imagination, “the shot heard round the world.” In tetrameter quatrains, rhymed abab, Emerson gives us a classic patriotic text for the Fourth of July.