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
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