The poem’s original name was “The Defence (sic) of Fort M’Henry ” the name was changed when it was later set to music. American troops at Fort McHenry withstood the night’s British attack during the Battle of Baltimore. 14, 1814, Key was moved to write a poetic tribute to the American flag still intact and waving in the wind, fog and rain. If things had been a little different, ‘ Hail, Columbia’, ‘ America the Beautiful’, or even ‘ My Country, ’Tis of Thee’ were all contenders for that honour.We learn in elementary school that the “Star Spangled Banner” was a poem written by Francis Scott Key during the War of 1812, and that at dawn on Sept. So, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ started life as a poem called ‘The Defence of Fort M’Henry’, was written not by one of America’s leading poets of the day but by an amateur, and – despite being written in 1814 – only became the official US national anthem in 1931. These words, of course, have become famous beyond the poem (or song): many people refer to the United States as the ‘land of the free’, especially.
#What does the star spangled banner song mean free#
(Ironically, in light of the circumstances surrounding the composition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, ‘Rule, Britannia’ is about the might of the British navy: ‘Britannia, rule the waves’.) Throughout ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, Francis Scott Key uses the refrain, ‘O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave’. This is a message carried by many other national anthems, unofficial or otherwise: one of Britain’s most popular national songs (although not its national anthem), ‘ Rule, Britannia’, proudly proclaims that ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’. The US flag with its stars and stripes waves freely over the land of the free, declaring America’s freedom from tyranny or oppression at the hands of another power. (It’s worth bearing in mind that less than forty years earlier, the United States was still fighting a war with Britain over US independence.) But, in a clever image, Key says that the confident footprints the British left as they marched to attack the American fort have been washed away by the blood of the British wounded and slain it’s a neat metaphor that encapsulates the idea of arrogance being destroyed by humiliating defeat.īut freedom is the message that shines through more than any other. Where the second stanza called the British fleet a ‘haughty host’, suggesting it was sheer arrogance and superiority which led the Brits to attack Baltimore Harbour and Fort McHenry, Key continues this line of argument in the third stanza: the British navy ‘vauntingly swore’ that the confusion of battle would leave the Americans without a home or a country. O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. No refuge could save the hireling and slaveįrom the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:Īnd the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave, Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution. That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,Ī home and a country, should leave us no more?
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
0 kommentar(er)
