The speaker of Longfellow’s poem is anonymous, which means that we don’t have any explicit information about their age, gender, class, or racial identity. However, we do know that the speaker is someone who cares deeply about U.S. history. They care so deeply, in fact, that they’ve taken on the role of a historian to recount the story of Paul Revere’s famous midnight ride. If they’ve felt compelled to tell this story, it’s because they believe the story to be of enduring significance. They indicate as much in the poem’s final stanza, where they insist that the importance of Revere’s midnight ride has reverberated through all of U.S. history and that it “shall echo forevermore” (line 124). Yet however significant Revere might be, the speaker is also concerned that his story in danger of being lost to history. They announce this fear right away in the opening stanza, where they declare: “Hardly a man is now alive / Who remembers that famous day and year” (lines 4–5). The speaker is therefore motivated, above all, to preserve a piece of U.S. history that they believe essential to the narrative of America’s freedom from the British.

It should be noted that the publication history of “Paul Revere’s Ride” invites another perspective on the identity of the poem’s speaker. Although first published in an 1861 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, the poem reappeared two years later in Longfellow’s 1863 collection titled Tales of a Wayside Inn. The poems of this collection are linked through a frame story in which a group of people assemble at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, just to the west of Boston. Each of the members in this group then tells a story of their choosing, much like in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Following a prologue that sets the scene, the first poem in the collection is titled “The Landlord’s Tale,” and it recounts the story of Revere’s midnight ride. In this context, the poem’s speaker has a particular identity, and he recounts Revere’s story at a particular place and time. That is, he’s an innkeeper who lived in eastern Massachusetts sometime in the early 1860s.

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