In Search of "The Star-Spangled Banner"

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• In Search of "The Star-Spangled Banner"
• Anthony Madrid (bio)

I mentioned to my students I had never understood the grammar of the first sentence of "The Star-Spangled Banner." They didn't know what I was talking about, and maybe you don't either. So, look:

O say can you see, by the dawn's early light,What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming,Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fightO'er the ramparts we watch'd were so gallantly streaming?

The difficulty arises at "O'er the ramparts we watch'd." The modern mind helplessly parses the sentence this way:

Can you see the thing that we hailed so proudly, whose stars and stripes we watched o'er the ramparts?

But, see, if you take it that way, where the thing we were watching was the flag, the last part of the sentence becomes ungrammatical:

Can you see the thing that we hailed so proudly, whose stars and stripes we watched o'er the ramparts were streaming—?

I had to repeat all of what I just said three or four times before everyone in class was "on board," that is, before everyone could see the problem, and admit they had always been uneasy about this, without really knowing it.

Someone pointed out that a great many things children are made to repeat over and over make very little sense to them, and it's an outrage that no one cares about this. His example was:

Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.

("Thy kingdom come"? What in the world does that mean? And also: Thy what will be done?)

A different student pointed out she was very surprised and disappointed I [End Page 58] had not already settled the point regarding the ramparts, as such negligence seemed to run counter to the Spirit of Joyful Research, about which I usually seemed so adamant. I promised to straighten the matter out as soon as I got home.

At six that evening, covered in sweat, I sat at my desk and wrote out the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner"—all the words I knew. Which is to say: the first verse, 25 percent. I doubt I had ever heard any of the rest of it, even once in my life. I am fifty-four.

The first thing I noticed when I wrote out the words surprised me very much. The meter of "The Star-Spangled Banner" is the same as the meter of the poem that everyone calls "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" (and which is actually called "A Visit from Saint Nicholas"). Observe:

Anapestal tetrameter. "The Star-Spangled Banner" is entirely written in anapests, with the usual allowable substitutions at the beginnings and endings of lines:

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It doesn't come off like anapests at all when you sing it. But there they are. More about this in a minute.

As for the grammar, my training in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poetry stood me in good stead, as soon as I looked at the piece in light of its having been composed in 1814. The word "watch" in "o'er the ramparts we watched" does not carry its usual modern sense. It's not watch as in "We were watching TV." It's more like "He's watching the house while we're away."

Samuel Johnson's first two definitions (1773) of watch are: "1. Forbearance of sleep; 2. attendance without sleep." That's more or less what Francis Scott Key had in mind there. I'll parse it afresh:

Can you see the thing that we hailed so proudly, whose stripes etc. were gallantly streaming o'er the ramparts that we were closely attending to, sleeplessly, all night—?

It actually clarifies a great deal, simply sticking the word that in the clause that's messing us up:

O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming,Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous...