Daughters of the American Revolution
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The Year 1812
As the war raged, I sat thinking to myself. What will this come to peace, more death, or shame and surrender? Though as I stared into the darkness pondering all my thoughts, wondering when the treacherous war might fall to an end, all I could do was sit and watch. No, no this was wrong. I couldnt bring myself to just watch when men were fighting; they could not be forgotten so easily, so I pulled out my pen and began to take the view in front of me into account. It was then that I began my writing journey.
The Chesapeake and the Shannon battled. Men went down, the water came up, and the war went on. Fifteen minutes passed as I watched the brutal event. Captain Broke called his men off as he surrendered. The Chesapeake had sixty-one killed and eighty-five wounded. The Shannon had thirty-three killed and fifty wounded. That was the partial inspiration for my poem later renamed, The Star Spangled Banner.
Once again more war broke out, the words cluttered my head and formed patterns and this is what it turned into:
“Oh, say, can you see, by the dawns early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilights last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thru the perilous fight,
Oer the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
Oer the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foes haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, oer the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the mornings first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream:
Tis the star-spangled banner: O, long may it wave
Oer the land of the free and the home of the brave!
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battles confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom