The rockets' red glare

The Three of Wands recently came up yet again, in "Cast your bread upon the waters." Looking at the image on the Rider-Waite card, I noticed the black-and-yellow checked sash extending bendwise against a red background and was reminded of the flag of Maryland (where I lived from the ages of 8 to 12, when my father was working at Martin Marietta), which is based on the coat of arms of Lord Baltimore.

A couple of months ago, in "The death of Nelson," I had connected the Three of Wands with a painting of the Battle of Trafalgar, which also shows ships on a yellowish sea:

I had a vague memory that there was a Battle of Baltimore which was also a naval battle and wondered if any paintings of that battle might also be relevant to the Three of Wands. One of the very first search results that came up, "Battle of Baltimore" at a site called History Maps, featured a painting by Walter Martin Baumhofer that was indeed very suggestive of Waite's card.

Not only is it a partly yellowish sea with ships on it, but in the foreground we have a man in red, with a garment of another color draped over his shoulders, looking out at the sea, exactly as in the Three of Wands.

Who is this man in red? None other than Francis Scott Key, for it was during the Battle of Baltimore that he saw the American flag still flying above Fort McHenry, inspiring him to write the poem that would later become our national anthem. The painting is usually titled Rockets' Red Glare in allusion to the poem, but Baumhofer serendipitously chose to make that glare primarily a different color, giving us the yellow sky and sea that links his picture to the Three of Wands.

The melody to which Key's poem is now sung originally belonged to a drinking song called "To Anacreon in Heaven." Realizing I was ignorant of the original lyrics, I looked them up. I was surprised to see how the third verse begins:

"The yellow-hair'd God" obviously means Apollo here, but on September 11 (just missing the anniversary of the Battle of Baltimore) I published "The Golden Age," -- a poem which I said in a comment there was "inspired mainly by the yellow sky and sea on the Three of Wands and by my old dream about Ajax and Epicles fighting under a blue sun" -- and this poem ascribes yellow hair to another god:

How few now know! In days of old,

The sun was blue, the sky was gold,

And Homer's fabled "wine-dark sea"

In truth was more like Pinot gris,

A shade of yellow full as fair

As blond Poseidon’s flaxen hair.

This is part of the conceit of the poem, which is that Homer's color terms have been grossly misunderstood because of how different the world was in his day. Poseidon's Homeric epithet κυανοχαίτης is usually understood to mean that his hair was dark, or blue, or blue-green -- anyway, the color of the sea. If Homer's sea was in fact yellow, then Poseidon must be reimagined as blond.

By a strange coincidence, just yesterday, in "The last Moriori," I posted an image of the flag of Barbados, which features the trident of Poseidon against a yellow background.

In fact, the overall design of the flag itself suggests the Three of Wands, where a narrow yellow sea lies between two somewhat bluish landmasses.

Barbados first came up in "An intense wish to see Barbados," where it was closely associated with Paris. Any of my readers who used to read Bill's now-deleted blogs will remember his posts about hearing "Francis Scott Key" as "France has got key."

Incidentally, check out the kind of designs that come up if you google flag of altantis:

I'm not the only one to have made the obvious connection: