"That illiterate National Anthem"

The United States has a pretty good national anthem, as they go. It's not as good as the Russian one -- which was better when it was Soviet -- which goes without saying -- but when you measure it against the competition in America, it looks great. "God Bless America?""This Land is Your Land" (hippies only)? "America the Beautiful?" These are all terrible candidates.

As we all know, the national anthem goes on into more verses. It was clearly intended to be sung as a bunch, since the first verse alone is almost as useless as the first eight lines of any poem. I wonder whether the other verses are sung at any official functions. If so, what is the bridge that connects them? We know how each verse ends if it's the last one to be sung, but how do you sing "home of the free and land of the brave" if you're just going to lead into another verse? Do you slow the tempo? What does the band do between verses?

Really it's all a big shame, because it's a lovely poem, and the tune is good, but the two just don't match up at all. They were not written for each other, and it shows. Would anyone, just listening to "The Star Spangled Banner", know that it has eight lines per verse? Or that the meter is dactylic somethingorother? It gets off to altogether the wrong start, dragging "oh" out into two syllables.

But still, as I say, what else is there? We're never going to have "Your Favorite Song" as our national anthem, so can we just settle on "The Star Spangled Banner" as something that's good enough for everyone? It could absolutely be worse, you know.