 |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
|
The
Lilies & the Sword By
Michael Knox Beran, author of The
Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy |
|||||||||
|
The selection of this last might seem surprising. Though his mother was an American, Sir Winston spent his life battling for a constitutional monarchy, not a republic. No matter. "The Battle Hymn" is one of the supreme fight songs; it can make even a dull mind conscious of the possibility of a sublime destiny; for such a man as Churchill, who spent his entire life breathing the fumes of exalted purposes, the song was more intoxicating than champagne. Like Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony, or the "Leonore" overture, the "Battle Hymn" lifts the suppliant skyward, into the heroic realms; and for an instant even a mediocre soul may feel itself in communion with the great ones of the earth, with those soldiers and statesmen, artists and priests, who have shown themselves, like Churchill himself, capable of grandeur. The "Battle Hymn," as it happens, was composed neither by a soldier nor a statesman, but by a mediocre poet. Julia Ward was born a banker's daughter in New York in 1819; she moved to Boston at the time of her marriage, in 1843, to a doctor, Samuel Gridley Howe. Mrs. Howe was a blue stocking and a woman of letters; she poured forth a series of poems, a play, a book on Cuba; but it was not until the crisis of 1861 that she rose above the forgettable in her work. She went to Washington, and while touring the nearby bivouacs of the Army of the Potomac (those "hundred circling camps") she heard the soldiers singing "John Brown's Body":
Someone asked Mrs. Howe whether she could give the tune a fresh and incisive set of words. The next morning, as she liked to tell the story, she started from sleep in the early dawn, and the "lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves" in her mind. She got out of bed and "in the dimness . . . . scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper." Mysterious Lilies In Patriotic Gore, his book on the literature of the Civil War, the critic Edmund Wilson argued that Mrs. Howe's "Battle Hymn" was an exercise in Old Testament Puritanism, a form of religious sentiment very much alive in America in the middle of the nineteenth century. Wilson drew attention to Mrs. Howe's echo of the prophet Isaiah:
The "Battle Hymn"'s emphasis on Old Testament wrath was, Wilson believed, typical of the Calvinist mind; in his essay he contended that, for latter-day American Puritans, the Christ of the New Testament was a "merely peripheral" figure, inferior to the angry and jealous Old Testament Jehovah whom 19th-century Yankees like John Brown and Mrs. Howe supposedly adored. "I have not been able to guess," Wilson wrote of the last verse of the "Battle Hymn," "where Julia Ward Howe got these lilies in the beauty of which Jesus is supposed to have been born. The only lilies mentioned in the Gospels are those that toil not neither do they spin." Jesus, Wilson argued, was an afterthought for Howe, a passive onlooker embowered in flowers, half a world away from the moral action of the age, the battles of the Civil War. "He is really irrelevant to her picture." The lilies "serve to place Him in a setting that is effeminate as well as remote." The "gentle and no doubt estimable Jesus," Wilson concluded, "is trampling no grapes of wrath." Mrs. Howe, we are given to understand, wanted to bring her contemporaries back to the tribal cruelties of the Old Testament, to God the Father, to a "militant, military God" who, "far from wanting us to love our enemies," only wanted us to pluck their eyes out, to torture and destroy them. The
Sweetest Canticle Consider, for example, Wilson's contention that the "Hero, born of woman" to whom Mrs. Howe refers in the third verse of the "Battle Hymn" is an Old Testament figure. The Hero, Wilson thinks, labors only in the Father's vineyards; he has nothing at all to do with the Son. When however we read the verse attentively we find that Mrs. Howe's Hero is at once a more ambiguous and a more complicated figure than Wilson would have us believe. The Hero is, at least in part, the Son himself; the woman who bore him is Mary. The coming of this Son forms the opening text of the "Battle Hymn": "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." This, of course, is as much a Son-centered New Testament text as it is an Old Testament Father-centered one: it is the Nunc dimittis of Luke 2:29-30, where, upon the first presentation of the child Jesus in the Temple, Simeon says,
Simeon, "just and devout," waiting, Saint Luke tells us, "for the consolation of Israel," had seen the coming of the Lord: for "the holy ghost was upon him." Francis Bacon thought the Nunc dimittis the "sweetest canticle." Edmund Burke called it "the beautiful and prophetic ejaculation." Its inclusion by Mrs. Howe in the first verse of the "Battle Hymn" shows up the wrongheadedness of Wilson's attempt to read the poem as an exercise in a purely Old Testament faith — as an effort, that is, to move away from the message of the Gospels, to prefer the Father to the Son. Mrs. Howe did of course draw, if only unconsciously, on the imagery of the Old Testament in composing the "Battle Hymn": her poem owes a great deal to the book of the Father. But she drew, too, on the poetry of the New Testament, the book of the Son. The most celebrated image in the "Battle Hymn" — the "grapes of wrath" whose vintage the Lord is "trampling out" — has both New Testament and Old Testament antecedents. The fathers of Israel are said by the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel to "have eaten sour grapes." Chalk one up for Wilson. But the "winepress of the wrath of God" forms a part of the poetry of the last book of the New Testament, the Revelation of John the Divine:
Mrs. How's Faith-and President Lincoln's In composing the "Battle Hymn" Mrs. Howe took pains to impress upon the verses the complexity of her faith. Christians are enjoined to be compassionate; and they are at the same time called upon to do justice. The ends of mercy require them to be gentle; the ends of justice force them frequently to be severe. The "Battle Hymn" preserves the tensions inherent in the faith. Mrs. Howe invokes the "beauty of the lilies," and the uncountable mercies of Christ; but the "Battle Hymn" insists that even as Christians revel in the gentleness of the lamb they have still an obligation to mete out a harsh justice to the wolf. The Son, with his transfiguring "glory," is at the same time a Hero, one who must wield a "terrible swift sword," and "crush the serpent with his heel." The tensions of the "Battle Hymn" are the same tensions — exquisite and troubling — of Lincoln's second inaugural address. Everyone knows the gentleness of Lincoln's language in that speech, "With malice toward none, with charity for all . . . ." But fewer remember how explicitly Lincoln reminded the nation that the obligation to be charitable — the obligation to be compassionate, the obligation, finally, to love — is often at odds with the obligation to do justice, the obligation to honor what Mrs. Howe, in the "Battle Hymn," called the "righteous sentence" of the Lord:
We must be charitable; and yet we must also judge, and judge at times severely. Lincoln's judgment on the South was clear:
Lincoln invokes Christ's principle, "judge not that ye not be judged," only after he himself has rendered very efficient judgment. Did Mrs. Howe do anything so very different? She gives us Christ in the flower-garden; but only after she has sounded forth the trumpet. Necessary
Paradoxes
I assumed, as I watched the telecast of the service that day, that the explicit reference to Christ in the last verse of the "Battle Hymn" would be similarly purged in the name of a sanitized, air-brushed secularism. But it was not; the drab school of civic ritual was defied. The last verse of the "Battle Hymn" was sung as Mrs. Howe published it in the February 1862 number of The Atlantic Monthly:
We must really insist on having both Mrs. Howe's lilies and her terrible swift sword before our eyes. We need to keep the faith that inspired the "Battle Hymn" — in all the potency of its paradoxes — close to us. It remains the indispensable fight song. |
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
inston
Churchill loved the great fight songs. When, in his eighties, he
became too old to get pleasure out of books he used to sit with
his record player in the afternoons and listen to military marches.
He liked especially the high-souled trumpet calls in the repertoire;
after his death in 1965 some of these were played at his state funeral,
and their notes sounded in the baroque spaces of Saint Paul's. The
"Reveille" was played — together with "The Last
Post" — by trumpeters high up in the Whispering Gallery
of the massive dome; "Fight the Good Fight" was sung;
and so, too, was "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
 |
||
|
|
|