I’d guess dews and damps are in some way related to the military camp? but what are/were they? one of the last song references that has me stumped. lyrics
theres a lot of bible references in this song. Its a fascinating hymn to study. here’s just a few Bible References.
“the coming of the Lord”
Matthew 24:30
And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.*
“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,”
Revelation 14:19 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.
“His truth is marching on”
John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Galatians 4:4 But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law,
Genesis 3:15-16 And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
He has sounded forth the trumpet
Revelations - concerning the seven consecutive trumpet judgments by seven angels before the coming of the Lord.
Also from Wikipedia, “Dew is water in the form of droplets that appears on thin, exposed objects in the morning or evening due to condensation.” (Bolding added by me.) I would think you would have experienced this once or twice in your lifetime. Also note how the stanza reads:
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
I think “dews and damps” are used to make the rhyme and meter work.
What is wrong with a completely literal interpretation? Dew often falls in the evening, and dew is damp. It gets cool and often damp at an army camp in the evening, so the soldiers light camp fires and oil lamps. The poetry lies in seeing the fires and lamps as totems of God.
Howe wrote it during a single sleepless night at the Willard Hotel after having, literally, visited an Army camp. Yes, a literal interpretation works fine.
the phrase dews and damps sounded like something very specific. Maybe military. I guess maybe I am just over thinking it and it is just poetic.
That must have been one heck of an impressive sight. All those camps and camp fires stretched out over a large area. The sounds of the men talking, the horses and equipment moving about. Quite a tour.
There are several verses, most notably in Revelation, that describe Jesus as having a sword. There are also several verses that specifically compare the word of God to a sword. Revelation 19:15 may be the inspiration for that phrase:
“And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.”
There are also Old Testament references to a sword of God: See, for instance, Gen 3:24, with “a flaming sword flashing back and forth”. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see that as “fateful lightning of a terrible swift sword”.
That particular passage is about guarding Eden, but one supposes that when God marches to war, He uses something not too dissimilar.
