Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar—
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more.

These lines open Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s poem “Old Ironsides,” written in 1830 in response to news that the U.S. Navy planned to dismantle the USS Constitution, the famed War of 1812 frigate nicknamed “Old Ironsides.” Holmes, then a young Bostonian (and later a leading “Fireside Poet”), published the poem as a public appeal to preserve the ship as a national symbol. The poem’s emotional force helped galvanize public sentiment; the Constitution was ultimately saved and later restored, becoming a lasting icon of early American naval history.

The speaker bitterly echoes the call to “tear” down the ship’s “tattered ensign,” using irony to condemn the idea of scrapping a vessel whose flag has flown over celebrated victories. The imagery contrasts past glory—cheering eyes, battle shouts, cannon fire—with the proposed indignity of ending the ship’s life. Calling the flag a “meteor of the ocean air” elevates it into a brilliant, almost celestial emblem of national pride. The stanza frames the ship not as mere timber and rigging but as a repository of collective memory, arguing that a nation dishonors itself when it discards the material symbols of its hard-won history.