Despite its other fine musical and lyrical qualities, Yankee Doodle, about which I wrote on Monday, didn't have the dignity of a national anthem. This is not to say that the anthems of other nations are uniformly fine pieces of work; for example, Great Britain's anthem, God Save the King (or Queen), started life in 1745 as a tribute to King George II. Its first verse began "God save great George, our King / Long live our noble king / God save the King."
The song got more lively in the second verse:
O Lord our God, arise
Scatter his enemies
And make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On him our hope we fix,
O save us all.
The British were less sanguinary than the French, who in 1795 adopted La Marseillaise as their anthem. It includes this fierce bit:
Entendez-vous dans les campagnes
Mugir ces feroces soldats?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras
Egorger vos fils, vos compagnes!
Which translates approximately to this:
Do you hear these ferocious soldiers
Roaring in the forests?
They're coming almost up to arms' reach
To cut the throats of your sons and wives!
Americans didn't go in for singing pious hopes for our leaders, nor (most of the time) for singing about how fierce and deadly the enemy was. In fact, our country didn't adopt a national anthem until 1931, when Congress selected The Star-Spangled Banner over the other contenders. Francis Scott Key had written it in 1814 while watching the British attack on Baltimore during the War of 1812. The song's first verse doesn't express pious hopes for the president, nor does it threaten citizens with slaughter, nor does it boast about America. Rather, and very unusually for national anthems, it simply asks a question: "Last night at sunset, our flag was flying over the ramparts [of Fort McHenry in Baltimore]. The sun is about to rise. Can you see it flying yet?" The second verse says "yes, it is still flying."
Key's third verse is a little more in the French model, beginning with these lines:
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
He returns to modest Anglophilia in the fourth and final verse, which says approximately, "Praise God for making us a nation and saving us this time; we will conquer when our cause is just. Let us hope it is always so as long as our flag shall fly." All four verses end with the anthem's most famous line, "O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave." Again, it's an unusual anthem, because it mostly doesn't brag, exhort, pray, or threaten, but rather asks if our flag is still flying and rejoices that it is.
Where Key slipped up was in his choice of music. He wrote the verses to be sung to the tune of a British song called To Anacreon in Heaven, the club song of the Anacreontic Society. It's replete with classical references and double entendres. It's also nearly unsingable: it stretches over an octave-and-a-half and has one leap of more than an octave. It has another fault, or perhaps an omission, which later writers have tried to solve, as I'll discuss in my third and concluding post on this subject.