I recently had occasion to read the original version of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" -- the American Civil War song written by abolitionist Julia Ward Howe to the tune of "John Brown's Body" -- as it appeared in the February 1862 issue of The Atlantic (jpg).
The first two verse are well known and strike the tone of righteous vengeance that one would expect from a "battle hymn."
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
The third verse, not much sung anymore, really surprised me.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on."
A "fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel" sounds appropriately wrathful, but it actually turns out to be about as far from smiting the wicked as it is possible to be: "As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal" -- that is, God will treat you the same way you treat those who show contempt for God. Smite the infidel, and God will smite you! How did a line like that find its way into a holy-war battle hymn?
I keep thinking that Howe must have meant something else by it, but I can't see any other way of reading it.
4 comments:
Maybe it is just an early example of the fine-sounding and memorably-phrased, but essentially meaningless, lyric that has been, more recently, a feature of so many of the more highbrow rock musicians - Paul Simon, David Bowie... people like that. They are like a Rorschach test - we project onto-them whatever we personally feel.
Julia Ward Howe, precursor to David Bowie... might be something in that.
What about this possibility . . . the more you smite the infidels the more grace I will shower upon you. Probably wrong, but it would make more sense within the overall context.
I guess the writer must have had something like that in mind, Frank, but the text certainly looks like it's saying "with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" -- a fine Christian sentiment, but not very martial!
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