Hamilton isn’t just for July 4. As many new fans drawn to the Broadway show by its holiday weekend launch on Disney+ are now discovering, this is one cultural phenomenon that rewards literally every repeat viewing or listening.
And why is that? One word: poetry. While you can grasp the overall arc of this immigrant story first time around, its knotty wordplay is so rich and resonant it can take years to unpick all the meanings and internal echoes. Writer and star Lin-Manuel Miranda spent more than six years laboring away on the sound and rhythm of each line, and it shows.
‘Hamilton’ burnishes its own legacy with a spectacular live recording
“Every couplet had so much care going into it,” Miranda told The Independent back in 2015. “We’re not just rhyming at the end of sentences. We’re rhyming six times within every line in certain places, so it’s a lot of care and meticulousness to make it all seem like it’s all coming off the cuff.”
So while it’s fun for fans to produce a “best songs of Hamilton” list, that’s also a little too macro-level to capture the true beauty of the show. You have to get down to the level of its verses to really appreciate what Miranda wrought — the internal rhymes, the imperfect rhymes, all that tongue-twisting alliteration, and everything else that makes the show a masterclass in poetry and hip-hop.
So here, inspired by a Twitter thread on the topic and after much deliberation, is my personal top 10 list in reverse order. My rules: No more than one rhyme can represent a song, and a “verse” is loosely defined as the length that a given rhyme continues. If you don’t see your favorite in here, there’s a good chance it was in my top 20. I’d list all of them, but hey, even Hamilton’s obsession had limits.
10. Bro.
Two Virginians and an immigrant walk into a room
Diametric’ly opposed, foes
They emerge with a compromise, having opened doors that were previously closed
(Bros)
— Burr and the chorus, “The Room Where It Happened”
Hamilton is always effective when we step into the perspective of Aaron Burr, and never more so than when he confronts his jealousy of Hamilton head-on. Just look how many volumes he’s speaking in this tightly-constructed 25 words with four rhymes that echo like an empty room.
Burr still calls Hamilton an immigrant, despite having just hailed him to his face as “Mr. Secretary.” He’s stressing that there are two Virginians, by which he means cunning, insightful aristocrats. By the numbers, by birth, they should be walking all over the scrappy immigrant.
But then they emerge with a compromise that gives each side something they want? Foes to bros? How did Hamilton do that? The use of “bros” is intentionally anachronistic because it helps us understand what we’re really talking about here. Where do we find the highest percentage of bros in our world? In the frat house. In the private dining room. In the exclusive nightclub. Or any other number of synonyms for secret society.
The Chainsmokers bro would like everyone to stop calling him a bro
That’s what is tearing Burr apart: He wants to be a member. He wants to know what happened on the inside so badly that even when Hamilton explains the need to have something that matters powering your negotiations — “when you’ve got skin in the game, you stay in the game” — Burr is too obsessed to notice his own absence of belief in, um, anything. All he cares about: How did he turn foes into bros? How can I? What are the magic words?
9. State of the Nation
I know the action in the street is excitin’
But Jesus, between all the bleedin’ ‘n fightin’
I’ve been readin’ ‘n writin’
We need to handle our financial situation
Are we a nation of states? What’s the state of our nation?
—Hamilton, “My Shot”
It’s hard to pick just one great rhyme from “My Shot,” a song so dense with them that it took a year to write. But here’s one of the most ambitious verses, and the only one that ties the whole of Hamilton together. It reaches back to the opening number to remind us that this kid likes to read, and forward to Act 2 where he’s constantly writing — on the country’s debt crisis, and whether indeed it is a country at all, or just a loose collection of former colonies. Act 1 will have a lot of excitement, this verse says, but just you wait: the real drama is money.
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Also, amidst all those dazzling internal rhymes, note the echo of Burr’s Princeton friend (mentioned just a few minutes earlier on stage) who “handles the financials. In the space of one song, Hamilton has gone from punching the bursar who won’t let him into Princeton to basically filing notice of his intent to become the bursar of the future United States. That makes for a hell of an “I want” song.
8. It’s corsets all the way down
Lock up ya daughters and horses, of course It’s
Hard to have intercourse over four sets of
corsets
– Hercules Mulligan, “Aaron Burr, Sir”
The idea behind the trio of rappers introduced at the end of Burr’s first song is that they’re old school, about to be blown away by Hamilton’s polysyllabic dexterity. John Laurens has his super basic posturing “in the place to be” verse. Lafayette is slightly more sophisticated, rapping in French.
And then there’s Hercules Mulligan, whose flow was inspired by Busta Rhymes and Notorious BIG. The tailor’s apprentice lets loose with a verse that is absolutely filthy, both in the sense of sexual outrage and in the soccer sense of “a filthy nutmeg” that bolts through the legs of Hamilton’s big number.
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As Lin-Manuel Miranda of 2015 would tell you, we have perhaps not commented enough on the fact that a movie now in the Disney canon has a supporting character who suggests he has sex with horses. There is an innocent explanation for the line, but given that “innocent” means that he likes to have sex with daughters in their parents’ houses, then steal their horses for a quick getaway, it is perhaps best not relied upon.
It is, of course, all gangster bluster. That is revealed in the “four sets of corsets” line, a hilarious exaggeration: No woman in revolutionary America, or anywhere ever, wore four corsets at once. Instead of turning to the subject of booze with “no more sex,” Laurens could have asked: Are you sure you’ve been with a woman, Hercules?
But man, what bluster. The rhyme structure, too, is filthy. The lyrics geniuses on Genius say we’re looking at a “sick double compound” where both lines rhymes internally with themselves and with each other. Placing “intercourse” right in the middle “mirrors the consonance and assonance of the rhyme, like literally reflects it backwards: cors-it becomes int-cors,” notes one contributor. “Sweet Jesus.”
7. On the pedestal
Now I’m the model of a modern major
general
The venerated Virginian veteran whose men are all
Lining up to put me up on a pedestal
—George Washington, “Right Hand Man”
This verse, Washington’s first in the show, is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s answer to Gilbert and Sullivan. The 19th century musical makers gave us the famously tongue-twisty “I am the very model of a Modern Major General” from Pirates of Penzance. That song was the gold standard for speedy recitation for more than a century, until Miranda blew past its record with “Guns and Ships.”
So Miranda pays homage. And at the same time, like Hamilton, he arrogantly asserts superiority. Who else would dare add another line of alliteration to one of the classics? But he’s got the chops: “venerated Virginian veteran” makes this stuff look easy.
More important is the next line, the show’s one acknowledgment that it too has put Washington on a pedestal. Only once do its lines hint, obliquely, that Washington owned slaves. (“Not yet,” he says sternly to the “black and white soldiers” wondering whether victory at Yorktown “means freedom.”) Chris Jackson, who played the general, added his own wordless hint — gasping and bowing in apology at the very end of the show when Eliza says “I speak out against slavery.”
In an age when America is reconsidering the men it has put on pedestals, perhaps we should listen to Washington’s insistence that he never wanted to be there in the first place. We should no longer “embellish his elegance and eloquence” because “the elephant is in the room,” he goes on to say. Veneration is a distraction, then as now, from more urgent facts — be they British cannons or root-and-branch racism.
6. Damn, son
Thomas Jefferson, always hesitant with the President
Reticent—there isn’t a plan he doesn’t jettison
Madison, you mad as a hatter, son, take your medicine
Damn, you’re in worse shape than the national debt is in!
— Hamilton, “Cabinet Battle #1”
In his first confrontation with cabinet rival Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton is all arrogance. Having explained his financial plan and damned Jefferson as a slave owner who sat out the war, he doesn’t hesitate to stick the boot in by insulting Jefferson and his ally James Madison personally.
This verse is a verbal victory lap with an astonishing 12 false rhymes in four lines. They take on Jefferson’s (historically accurate) hesitation about whether he wanted to be in politics at all, and Madison’s (also accurate) sickliness; the architect of the Constitution is coughing into his handkerchief at this point.
To win support for his plan, Hamilton should have stuck with that mic drop of a line about the debt he was trying to fix. Of course, he couldn’t resist stepping over the line as the record scratches out; in the lines that follow, he calls his opponents “two shits” and literally asks to kick their asses. Oh, Alexander.
5. Consistency!
She courted me
Escorted me to bed and when she had me in a corner
That’s when Reynolds extorted me
For a sordid fee, I paid him quarterly
I may have mortally wounded my prospects
But my papers are orderly!
As you can see I kept a record of every check in my checkered history.
Check it again against your list and see
Consistency!
— Hamilton, “We Know”
Hamilton is cornered by Burr, Madison, and Jefferson, who suspect his off-the-books payments to a Mr. James Reynolds are a sign of embezzlement. That’s an accusation Hamilton can’t take, so he tells them the truth: Nah, dudes, it’s just sexual blackmail.
In his desperation to explain, Hamilton spits out a series of jagged internal rhymes. They all match me, which is repeated four times in three lines. This shows how egotistical he’s become, blind to how telling the tale will hurt Eliza. “Me… me… me” in this verse will later be echoed by her furious “you, you, you” in “Burn.”
Hamilton repeats “check” three times — once as a noun, once as an adjective (“checkered”), and once as a verb. “Checkered” also references the chess board, one of the show’s repeated metaphors. And behind the scenes, here’s Miranda showing off again, proving he can rhyme “consistency” with “list and see” without the whole thing sounding clunky as hell.
4. A Game of Chess
You must be out of your goddamn mind if you think
The President is gonna bring the nation to the brink
Of meddling in the middle of a military mess
A game of chess, where France is Queen and Kingless
We signed a treaty with a King whose head is now in a basket
Would you like to take it out and ask it?
“Should we honor our treaty, King Louis’ head?”
“Uh, do whatever you want, I’m super dead.”
— Hamilton, “Cabinet Battle #2”
By his second Cabinet confrontation with Jefferson, Hamilton is both angrier and more adept at arguing policy. Jefferson argues the freshly-minted United States should go back to war with England to support America’s ally, France, and can’t resist taunting his opponent for dressing “like fake royalty.” Hamilton takes a second before launching into a screaming insult that momentarily offsets the meter of the rap. But then he recovers his cool with “if you think…”
What follows is a 100 percent accurate summary of America’s nixed treaty obligations and the fragility of the French revolution that is way more entertaining than it has any right to be. It’s got alliteration galore (“meddling in the middle…”), it’s got metaphor (chess, but without the two most important pieces), and it’s even got ventriloquism: Hamilton mimes pulling Louis XVI’s head out of its guillotine basket, a skit that would not look out of place in a Monty Python movie. No wonder Washington was immediately convinced.
3. A bit of a posture
The conversation lasted two minutes, maybe three minutes
Everything we said in total agreement
It’s a dream and it’s a bit of a dance
A bit of a posture, it’s a bit of a stance
He’s a bit of a flirt, but Im’a give it a chance
I asked about his family, did you see his answer?
His hands started fidgeting, he looked askance
He’s penniless, he’s flying by the seat of his pants
— Angelica, “Satisfied”
Angelica Schulyer has already been established as an intellectual who’s having a hard time finding a mind at work on the same level as hers when she meets Hamilton in 1780. Suddenly there’s a spark of electricity — “Ben Franklin with the key and the kite” — and Angelica wonders what the catch is before remembering to catch the audience up with her lightning-fast brain: “You see it, right?”
There follows this verse, which is extraordinary in so many ways. Lines vary in length; the rhymes become both unusual (“three minutes” with
“agreement, it’s …”) and impressively repetitious (dance, stance, chance, askance, pants) at the same time.
The verse tells us everything we need to know about her character: Here, truly, is a fine mind stuck in a world where she has to “marry rich.” On top of that, Angelica has absolutely called Hamilton out for what he is: a posturing, poverty-stricken genius.
It’s this verse, above all, that she will soon come to regret: the fact that she “sized him up so quickly.”
2. Every ‘Burr, Sir’
Credit: © 2020 Lin-Manuel Miranda And Nevis Productions, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
You punched the bursar?
— Burr, “Aaron Burr, Sir”
It starts as a cute joke. Take the internal rhyme of “Aaron Burr, sir” and pair it up with just about every word that’s a close fit. The result could have become grating; instead, like Burr himself, it is improbably charming. That’s proof of the power of 100 percent commitment to a comedy bit.
In the first half, Miranda matches “Burr, sir” with “as you were,” “immature,” “confer,” “sure,” “blur,” and “uh?” By the time we get to the show-stopping “Room Where It Happens” in Act 2, Miranda was running out of rhymes — and that’s why Burr starts gabbing about the late General Mercer, a very deep cut when it comes to revolutionary leaders.
But nowhere in the show is the great quest for “Burr, sir” rhymes more laugh-out-loud funny than at the start. Hamilton spins a non-historically accurate but character-appropriate tale about hitting a skeptical friend of Burr’s at Princeton who “handles the financials” and looked at Hamilton like he was stupid. “You punched the bursar?” Burr says, incredulous.
The audience’s expectation is that we’ll get another clever rhyme in response, which is why it’s even funnier that this one time, and one time only, Hamilton replies simply: “Yes.” Comedy gold.
1. This is the difference
I’m in the cabinet, I am complicit in
Watching him grabbing at power and kiss it
If Washington isn’t gon’ listen
To disciplined dissidents, this is the
difference:
This kid is out!
—Jefferson, “Washington on Your Side”
Despite stiff competition, Daveed Diggs emerges as the virtuoso spinner of verse in Hamilton. His performance as Lafayette in “Guns and Ships” often grabs the spotlight; it’s clocked as the fastest song in Broadway history measured in words per minute. But that song and Lafayette’s other lines are over in a flash. It isn’t until his performance as Thomas Jefferson in Act 2 that Diggs gets a chance to shine for more than a minute at a time.
And what was Diggs’ favorite verse to perform? This one, from the bouncy west coast hip-hop tune “Washington on Your Side.” The music cuts out, and an increasingly furious Jefferson explains why he has to resign as Secretary of State in protest at Hamilton’s financial plan. This verse emerged right at the end of the writing process, when Miranda decided to challenge Diggs with the most polysyllabic, Kendrick Lamar-inspired rap he could muster.
The result: probably the most impressive five lines in the entire show.
As appropriate for the polished poetic wordsmith who wrote the Declaration of Independence, this verse is full of dactyls. That’s not a kind of dinosaur, but a collection of three syllables with the emphasis on the first one. (“I’M in the CAB-in-et, I am com-PLIC-it in …”) How many dactyls can Miranda pack in? Five? Ten? Try 16 in a row.
It’s as if we can see the great wheel of Jefferson’s brain spinning up and sparking a flame on the word “out.” No wonder the music returns with an impressed-sounding “oh!” from the chorus.
And that’s just scratching the surface on a verse that could take entire seminars to deconstruct. Those tightly-packed internal rhymes (“Washington” with “watching him”; “listen” with “disciplined”)! That alliteration (disciplined dissidents… difference)! The line about grabbing power and kissing, which doesn’t just sum up Hamilton’s entire life but also foreshadows the sex scandal that’s about to wallop him!
The only way the song can follow this verse without deflating is by dropping the show’s most R-rated swear, cut in the Disney version (“southern motherfucking Democratic-Republicans!”) and yet more internal rhyme stacks (“get in the weeds, look for the seeds of Hamilton’s misdeeds.”)
It must be nice, it must be nice, to have poetry on your side.
Hamilton is now streaming on Disney+.
