Baffled our foes stand on the shore, follow they will not dare
Posted by Sappho on September 18th, 2014 filed in Music
A friend in Scotland posts to Facebook today that she just saw a teenager “wearing a kilt and a blue & white (Scottish national colors) football jersey emblazoned with the word YES. Oh, and he was grinning like a fiend.” A friend in England posts “Scotland – while I understand your want for independence, I do hope you’ll stay.”
While I wait to learn whether the Scots will vote for independence (the Princeton Election Consortium predicts No, but with a close vote, and perhaps some last minute momentum breaking toward Yes), I’ve been listening to some old Scottish songs. Skye Boat Song is a lovely ballad about the escape of Bonnie Prince Charlie, here beautifully sung in a collaboration by two women who met on Youtube.
I like sometimes to take a song and play it over and over, to work the lyrics into my memory. And so, as I played this one over and over, I was struck by the words “Baffled our foes stand on the shore, follow they will not dare.” This is, after all, a song about defeat. The hopes of the singer that “Yet for my sword, here in my hand, Charlie will come again” never materialized. And the song remembers that defeat, how “burned was our homes” and those “silently laid dead on Culloden’s field.” But it still adds a triumphant note to the escape; not only does Bonnie Prince Charlie escape the troops searching for him, but, as his bonny boat speeds into the roaring wind and rolling waves, thunderclaps rending the air, the foe don’t dare follow him, beaten by the storm that his boat braves. And it occurs to me how readily nationalist tales and songs weave triumphs even with the bitterness of defeat.
After all, think of our own Star-Spangled Banner. It comes out of a war in which we were humiliated (the White House burned) and in which, arguably, even once all our victories were counted alongside our defeats, it was really Canada that won the war. But, whether or not you can sing those notoriously difficult high notes, and whether or not you remember the name of the battle the song commemorates, you will, if you’re American, always remember that at the end of that perilous night, the flag did still wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.