james_davis_nicoll | Strip-mining songs

I'm listening to a recording of Ray Charles singing AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL. Now, in many ways ATB is superior to THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER (Humans can sing ATB without risking spontaneous resonant cranial liquifaction) but when I pulled up a copy of the lyrics of ATB I noticed something about it that illuminated an aspect TSSB banner that I had sort of been aware of but never overtly noticed:

if you are pillaging songs and in particular national anthem lyrics [1] for titles, TSSB is an unusally rich ore. Lots of nice short phrases in there that would look good on a book spine. I know for a fact that both DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT and TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING have been used and that is just from the first two lines. I think IN DREAD SILENCE REPOSES has potential and hasn't been used yet as far as I know.

ATB is somewhat less rich. O BEAUTIFUL FOR PILGRIM FEET doesn't really work for me. COMFIRM THY SOUL IN SELF-CONTROL sounds like a good idea but not for a book title. I _like_ ALABASTER CITES GLEAM/ UNDIMMED BY HUMAN TEARS but what first comes to mind is that the best way to arrange that is to remove the humans. A post-plague story, maybe. Or maybe a Simakian post-human setting, like CITY.

In fact, of all the national anthems I know the lyrics for, and I know three, TSSB is the most fruitful source of titles. I hate O CANADA for many reasons and now the relative poverity of its lyrics is among them. The official version has 60-odd English words, fewer if you don't count repeated lines. None of them could be used as titles except perhaps satirically and even there, I think Peter C. Newman inserted a NOT between NORTH and STRONG.

I like some of the previous versions (the Weir, for example) but as title ore they aren't much better. Plus, does it bother anyone else that our nation anthem has been revised more often than the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics?

Actually, O CANADA IS kind of a nervous sounding anthem, very worried about keeping the place safe. The recurring theme is that we're standing on guard. Fear us, world! We are alert and relatively motionless!

1: Which admittedly ATB isn't.