[del]O say[/del] can you see, [del]by the dawn’s early light,[/del]
What [del]so proudly[/del] we hail’d [del]at the twilight’s last gleaming,[/del]
Whose broad stripes and bright stars [del]through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts[/del] we watch’d [del]were so gallantly streaming?[/del]
Can you see what we hailed? is a perfectly straightforward question. Rewritten as a declarative sentence it becomes “We hailed [the flag].” “What” is the object of “we hailed,” standing as a pronoun for something that will be revealed later as the flag.
“Whose broad stripes and bright stars we watched” is also straightforward. Whose is another pronoun, in the genitive, and also stands for the flag. “We watched [the flag’s] broad stripes and bright stars.”
“… whose broad stripes and brights stars o’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming” means that the stripes and stars were gallantly streaming over the ramparts, and they were watching those ramparts. They were in a battle, they weren’t there to look at a flag.
To see if they were being blasted to pieces by the cannon barrage? To see if the fort would still be there in the morning? They weren’t watching a fireworks show. They were watching the fort guarding Baltimore being pounded, but not into submission. In the morning light, the fireworks were gone, and the ramparts were still there. And were not surrendered. Or something like that.
What is supposed to be the error? Even in your abbreviated version, how would you fix it? That would help me understand your objection.
It looks fine to me. Though I’d argue you keep an additional subjunctive clause, which may confuse things. The abbreviated version I would choose is “Can you see what we hailed, whose stripes and stars were streaming?” The antecedent to “what we hailed” is not stated until later in the song: “our flag.” From there we can change it to “Can you see the flag whose stripes and stars were streaming?”
The word “were” may seem off there, but that’s because we usually would include a word establishing the time. (We’d more likely say “Can you see the flag whose stripes and stars were streaming last night?” Unfortunately, the clause doing so has been taken out for clarity. It’s really “Can you see the flag (that we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming) whose stripes and stars were streaming?” Or, to reduce the poetic language, “Can you see the flag that we saw just before sunset, whose stripes and stars were waving?”
And, yes, what they hailed (i.e. saw) last night was the flag, but what they were actually watching were the ramparts. That is where they saw the flag so gallantly streaming, i.e. waving through the air. It is also where they saw the flag at night, through the light of the rockets, aka bombs bursting in air.
For consistency, I guess I should have also defined “ramparts” in modern colloquial language. They are the defensive walls of the fort. Seeing them fall would mean the fort could have been invaded. Though, in actuality, they were probably watching the entire battle, with the ramparts being a bit of poetic metonymy. Watching the walls is merely one part of watching the whole battle.
So they watched the battle, and saw the flag flying above and behind the walls of the fort.
Edit:
I don’t. I think they watched the battle, and merely saw (hailed) the flag. Similar to how you can watch a play, and see the actors.
That’s not correct though. This is the thing I was talking about earlier, confusing grammar and semantics.
A good way to quickly explain why the flag can’t be the object of the phrase “we watched” is, since grammar is strictly rules about how words can be arranged, and “flag” does not appear as a word anywhere in the passage, “flag” cannot be the object of any phrase in the passage. Do you see what I mean?
I agree that the ramparts are what’s being watched, but the word “flag” doesn’t appear in the part that refers to the flag. It’s “what” (i.e., “that thing we so proudly hailed”).
Basically, I misread “whose broad stripes and bright stars” as both the object of “we watched” and the subject of “were streaming.”
If that were the intended grammar of the passage, it would be like saying “His cat we petted was purring” as a complete sentence intended to mean that both we petted the cat and the cat was purring–i.e., it would not be grammatical.
It turns out I had misread the intended grammatical relations, so that’s how that went!
“What” is a pronoun that stands for “the flag.” So is “that thing”.
The flag was seen over the ramparts. They were not watching the ramparts, figuratively or literally. They were watching the flag. The flag is the subject of every line, even where the word is not used. That’s what makes it a poem. About the flag.
Exapno, it looks like what you’re talking about is something other than grammar–you’re using “subject” to mean topic in your latst post, for example, but that is very distinct from the grammatical sense of the term “subject.”
I’m talking about grammar in the OP and all subsequent posts, just to be sure that’s clear.
Grammar doesn’t (and shouldn’t) strictly apply to creative works like song or poems (and what is a song but a poem set to music) certainly not ones from 1812 or shortly thereafter (certainly modern grammar).
Speaking as a poet myself–one who sometimes uses ungrammatical English in his work–I would disagree. While not every artistic work in English must adhere to grammatical English, deviations would generally be meaningful as such, and would be amenable to the provision of a rationale. In other words, when it comes to poetry and song, English grammar is the default background, which lends significance to any grammatical deviations. The deviations get their effect from our grammatical expectations.
It is a complicated sentence … especially since OP’s “sentence” takes from TWO sentences with the main clause (actually clause pair!) “say can you see” borrowed from the 1st sentence into the 2nd. (What’s this called? It’s not proper formal grammar but is fine in conversation and poetry.) HOWEVER, the flaw OP finds is easily disposed of by inserting an implicit “that” or “which”:
Can you see what we hailed by the gleaming, whose stripes and stars**,** [which] we watched**,** were streaming?
It’s the syntax that’s problematic. The fact that people have to piece it together differently to understand whether or not it’s grammatical is a clue. You’d have to correct it by moving parts around, and even then it’s awkward:
O say, can you see by the dawn’s early light
that which we hailed so proudly
by the last gleaming of twilight?
Can you see the broad stripes and bright stars
that were so gallantly streaming
over the ramparts as we watched?
The ramparts were the defensive walls of Fort McHenry. Keys wasn’t watching the ramparts: he was watching to see if the flag was still flying after the British bombardment during the night. He was a pretty terrible poet, frankly, just a lawyer who jotted down [bad] poems as they came to him. I know the National Anthem holds a sacred place in a lot of hearts because of what it symbolizes, but it’s pretty poorly constructed.