The Star-spangled Banner

I've just spent some time with "The Star-spangled Banner." I don't really have anything new to say about it, but I want to say it anyway. This is the kind of post that has, in times past, induced friends to say, "You need something to do." But, honestly, this is what I like doing.

Some historical background helps a good deal, as this piece by Isaac Asimov shows. And I know I'm jumping ahead a little. The bombardment of Fort McHenry didn't occur until the night of September 13--14 and as I write this, it's still August.

It's in iambic pentameter. I didn't know that. It occurred to me to check when I noticed that "dawn's early light" from stanza one and "morning's first beam" from stanza three had the same stresses.

The experience of trying to find out what "the Banner" says is as good an argument as I have found for teaching the diagramming of sentences. There really isn't any other way to tell what it means. For instance, "twilight's last gleaming," "through the night," and "morning's first beam" identify the three relevant sightings. The first two are actual, the third only potential. It is the third one that provides the dramatic tension in the song. Those three together say, "We saw the flag last night at sundown and then again by the light of the explosions in the night. I wonder whether we will see it again at dawn."

The flag is "spangled" with stars in the sense that they mark the blue background as brightly as if they gleamed as metal would gleam. A spang, in Middle English, is a buckle or a clasp; spangel is a diminutive. So, "a little buckle." The stars, being cloth, do not gleam, of course, but they are as prominent, in "the morning's first beams" as if they really did gleam.

There is a roaring ambiguity in the fourth stanza. How are we to understand "when" in the phrase "conquer we must when our cause (it) is just?" Does it mean that our cause is just and therefore we will conquer? Does it mean that on those occasions when our cause is just, we will conquer--but not on other occasions, when our cause is not just? A plain reading favors the second interpretation. The occasion on which it was written favors the first.

I don't know what Francis Scott Key's own religious framework was, but I'd guess he was a Deist, as most of the Framers were. I notice, for instance, that of the three references to God, one uses the word "God" (In God is our trust), one uses "Heaven" (the heav'n-rescued land) and one "Power" (that made and preserved us a nation). It sounds like Jefferson's "the laws of nature and of nature's God" to me. Not that it matters. Maybe Key was just being poetic.

And finally, a summary of the account the poem gives, at one point per stanza. Stanza one: (In the morning) Can you see the flag? Stanza two: Yes, there it is. Stanza three: But the bad guys are gone. Stanza four: May we praise the Power that has delivered us!