“Concord Hymn” is an occasional poem—that is, the poet makes clear the poem does not spring from some personal, private, confessional urgencies; rather, it serves to mark a momentous public event. The poet speaks for a community. Many countries, America included, appoint poets to serve as Poet Laureates, whose job it is to write such occasional poems. Occasional verses are compelled by shared emotions and are written in reaction to a specific event or moment that is, in turn, elevated to define the mindset and emotional registry of an entire culture at that specific moment.

Emerson’s poem was commissioned to commemorate the occasion of an event critical to a culture’s history. Court poets have been called on to write such memorial verses since Antiquity to mark state weddings or funerals, the coronation of a monarch, a great victory or catastrophic loss on the battlefield, or some large-scale natural disaster. These verses resist elaborate or ornamental language devices—they deal in direct and reader-friendly expression and are designed most often to be read or proclaimed publicly.

Occasional poems most often leave their deepest emotional mark on the generation experiencing the event itself—often when such poems become canonical, they inevitably come with footnotes to explain to later generations the historic occasion itself.