Health & Fitness
The Star Spangled Banner
Star Spangled Banner - verse and song in our country's history and wars.
The Star Spangled Banner began as a poem but was quickly set to music.
Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
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Its’ literary merits were lauded in the link (below) sent to me by Poets in the Community, who will be presenting revolutionary verse during the Waverly Main Street War of 1812 Bicentennial Commemoration on Sunday, April 1, 2012 between 12 and 2pm.
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Performing songs at the same event outside Waverly Town Hall will be Midway Fair.
Creative collaboration between musicians and poets that day are anticipated as song and verse are part of our fabric!
Patriotism, pride and a sense of nation flowed from shared sentiments that were eloquently expressed by Francis Scott Key. In stark contrast are the 1915 words of John McCrae eulogizing fallen soldiers from World War I
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The banner became a song for a new nation free for some but not all, growing, expanding and optimistic.
Fifty years later, some in the nation sang a different tune in a war pitting brothers against brothers, citizens against each other and tearing the country apart.
Old John Brown’s body lies moldering in the grave,
While weep the sons of bondage whom he ventured all to save;
But tho he lost his life while struggling for the slave,
His soul is marching on.
The conflict that he heralded he looks from heaven to view,
On the army of the Union with its flag red, white and blue.
And heaven shall ring with anthems o’er the deed they mean to do,
For his soul is marching on.
At the end of that war, Walt Whitman wrote of the fallen leader Abraham Lincoln.
When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d-and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
O powerful, western, fallen star!
O shades of night! O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d! O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless! O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud, that will not free my soul!
In America, ballparks broadcast the national anthem while thousands stand in place and millions more watch on from home.
At Fort McHenry one can push a button to hear any of a dozen different versions, including Whitney Houston from the Super-bowl and Jimi Hendrix from Woodstock.
Shortly after 9-11, a flag draped a crane in the voided pit of the World Trade Center rubble filled, too, with the ashes of thousands of the dead. That image was seen by billions of people all around the world. It reminding us of that moment when Key saw the flag General Armistead commissioned Mary Pickersgill to create was still there. The British had marched on Washington, burned the White House and headed up to Baltimore to finish off that “nest of pirates” on the Chesapeake; but the citizens of Baltimore has been ready for them at North Point and on the Patapsco.
On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!