The following checks out. It’s grammatical.
And the following also checks out.
But the following does not check out:
What do you think?
So you’ve taken out all the extraneous words and reduced it to the important bits? I think the vital word is “still.” As in “Can you see that it is still streaming (despite all the crap that has been thrown at it).”
Not the most important parts, rather, the parts that are necessary to highlight the grammatical infelicity I’m talking about.
The word “still” doesn’t appear in the part of the song I pruned this from so it can’t be a word vital to the grammar of the passage!
Oh, you don’t even need “by the gleaming”, nor really the “and” bit.
Can you see what we hailed, whose stripes were streaming?
Can you see what we hailed, whose stripes we watched?
*Can you see what we hailed, whose stripes we watched were streaming.
The object of “watched” is “ramparts.”
They were watching the ramparts and the flag was over the ramparts?
I guess… though I don’t know why you’d watch a rampart!
Can you see what we hailed, whose stripes were streaming over the ramparts we watched?
I see…
Never mind!
Here’s the original original, from the manuscript.
Frylock seems to be objecting to this line:
It can be unpoetized.
That looks correct to me.
Frylock, you can’t pick up bits and pieces from different lines and butt them together into the mishmash “Can you see what we hailed by the gleaming, whose stripes and stars we watched were streaming?” That’s not what the song says. It may be ungrammatical, but you’re the one who sucked all the grammar out of it. Blame yourself, not Key.
Seems perfectly grammatical to me.
O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
[the flag]
whose broad stripes and bright stars were so gallantly streaming through the perilous flght (that we watched over the ramparts).
nm
I don’t think Exapno’s reading makes sense. When you add the clause whose verb is “see,” you can’t make “flag” the object of both “see” and “watched.”
pulykamell could be right that the object of “watched” is “fight,” however. The phrasing of the song makes it hard to scan that way, but when you read it without the musical phrasing in mind, that makes slightly more sense than my reading.
I’m really confused by your comment here–you said I shouldn’t pick up bits and pieces etc but didn’t you just do so?
It seems to me what you and I did was give two different grammatical readings–but the method is sound in both cases. Pruning out clauses to highlight (not discover) a grammatical structure.
Basically it looks to me like there is a grammatical ambiguity, and I failed to find two possible resolutions that make it grammatical, instead mistaking it for an ungrammatical passage.
Rearranging the phrases makes it clear:
[The flag] Whose broad stripes and bright stars were so gallantly streaming o’er the ramparts we watched, through the perilous fight.
Ah, that way seems to work, too.
Again, go back to the original lines.
What did they watch? The flag, described by its broad stripes and bright stars which were streaming. At first you’d think they saw the flag despite the fight, which an observer would normally expect to interfere, but the light from the fight actually illuminates the flag, a nice poetic twist. Yes, they saw the flag and watched the flag wave. See below.
The clauses must be part of the same grammatical structure, though. Look at the whole stanza line by line checking what the verbs reflect.
What do they see? The flag.
What did they hail? The flag.
Yep, that’s the flag, but there’s no verb, so the next line must be added.
What did they watch? The flag. Where? As it flew over the ramparts.
Again, no verb action for the watcher, so attach the next line.
What did the bursts give proof to? The flag.
What waves? The flag.
Just a prepositional cause to be attached to the previous line, so:
What waves? The flag. Where? Not merely physicallyover the ramparts but metaphorically over the whole country.
Yes, that is so. Again, since it’s a technique for highlighting grammatical features, if one has misread the grammar, this might come out in the “highlighted” version. That’s what happened in my case–and I still think, in yours as well. Meanwhile the other two readings offered in the thread look like they don’t make the mistake you and I have made. This is easily seen (not discovered) using the same highlighting technique of pruning away dependent and relative clauses.
Part of the problem here is you’re mixing up grammar and semantics. What they saw is, grammitically speaking, “what… we hailed…”, not the flag.
That “the flag” is the antecedent to “what… we hailed…” is not grammatically relevant. (Antecedence is a semantic concept, not a grammatical one. This is exactly the kind of phenomenon that makes grammatical ambiguity possible.)
The problem is that grammatically, “we watch’d” can’t have “what we hailed” as its subject. It doesn’t work, even in poetically “free” word order.
By the dawn’s early light, can you see what we hailed so proudly by the twilight’s last gleaming–whose broad stripes and bright stars were so gallantly streaming through the perilous fight that we watched over the ramparts?
By the dawn’s early light, can you see what we hailed so proudly by the twilight’s last gleaming–whose broad stripes and bright stars were so gallantly streaming over the ramparts that we watched through the perilous fight?
^those are the two viable readings of the line that I see in the thread. I think on reading and re-reading it’s technically open to either interpretation. But definitely not ungrammatical, as a grammatical reading (two of em!) can be given.