The Lilies & the Sword
The “Battle Hymn” is the indispensable fight song.

By Michael Knox Beran, author of The Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy
October 20-21, 2001

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."

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":

John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
But his soul goes marching on . . . .

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:

I have trodden the winepress alone . . . . I will tread [upon recalcitrant peoples] in mine anger, and trample them in my fury . . . .

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

Wilson has I think misread the "Battle Hymn." He labors to read the poem as an encomium to the militant God of the Old Testament, a repudiation of the New Testament flower child for whom, Wilson thinks, Mrs. Howe had little patience. But Wilson's reading is not borne out by the language of the "Battle Hymn." Mrs. Howe was content, in her poem, to reproduce the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity, with all its attendant mysteries and ambiguities: as a result the "Battle Hymn" leaves the reader unable to say precisely which of the "Three in One, One in Three" she has in mind in any given line.

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,

Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word. For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.

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:

And the Angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the winepress.

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:

Yet, if God wills that it [the War] continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."

We must be charitable; and yet we must also judge, and judge at times severely. Lincoln's judgment on the South was clear:

Both [the North and the South] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we not be judged. . . . The Almighty has His own purposes.

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

The paradox at the heart the "Battle Hymn" — the paradox at the heart of the second inaugural address — is central to the faith in which both are consecrated. The "fiery gospel," written in the "burnished rows of steel" of Mrs. Howe's war poetry, is at the same time a gospel of sublime, transfiguring, all-embracing love. We cannot in our present state hope fully to understand this mystery, and yet it is important that we keep it always before our eyes. It was unfortunate, then, that in the service in the National Cathedral on September 14th an overstrained effort at ecumenical blandness should have led to a blunting of the paradox. By all means, honor the three great monotheistic faiths in the cathedral. But do not censor — do not mortify — the faith most closely woven into the fabric of the Republic by depriving its poetry of its point and its punch — the fact of the incarnation. The second verse of Martin Luther's hymn, "A Mighty Fortress is Our God," was unceremoniously dropped from the text sung in the cathedral that day. Why? I can only think because it refers not merely to God but to the divinity of Christ:

Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing,
Were not the right man on our side, the man of God's own choosing:
Dost ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is he;
Lord Sabaoth his Name, from age to age the same,
—------And He must win the battle.

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:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
—------While God is marching on.

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.