Garden Square

Whether we’ve read the poem or not, what most of us know about Paul Revere comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” written nearly a century after the events of April 18, 1775. The poem is well worth reading, even though Longfellow got several important points wrong. Revere didn’t make his midnight ride alone. There were as many as 40 patriots covertly spreading the word “through every Middlesex village and farm.” Revere never actually reached Concord. He was captured and temporarily detained in Lexington. He was released without his borrowed horse and had to walk home while a companion, Samuel Prescott, continued on to raise the alarm. So why did Longfellow, who surely knew the facts, make up his own version of the tale? Maybe because there just aren’t a lot of good words that rhyme with Prescott.