New Vital Sparks essay.
Will Fitzgerald
Secular Songs in The Sacred Harp, Part 1
Robert Vaughn
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David Warren Steel
Robert Vaughn wrote:
>>>Sometime in his high school years, my son wrote a report on Timothy Dwight’s “Columbia.” His conclusion was that it was written while Dwight was chaplain in the army, circa 1778, and that the poem suggests his idea that America would be the seat of God’s kingdom and Americans its saints. I have not checked to refresh myself on Dwight’s theology lately, but I suspect that hits it pretty close.
Will Fitzgerald wrote:
>>> A song I strongly associate with this song [ODE ON SCIENCE] is 358 MURILLO’S LESSON, partly because it, too, refers to the United States as Columbia, and centers the United States as a place of special import:
>>>>This song shed its rarely sung second verse in the 2025 edition. Again, I don’t have insight into why the second verse was dropped, but I do know the one time I led both verses I mildly surprised the class by singing them both.
I suggested that the "second verse" be dropped, and I doubt I was alone in this. The full text of Dwight's poem is at https://home.olemiss.edu/~mudws/texts/Columbia.txt The full text was printed with Matilda Durham's STAR OF COLUMBIA in the 1840 appendix of Southern Harmony (p. 260), a setting of the tune "Napoleon Crossing the Rhine." This setting, and complete text, were carried into the 1844 Sacred Harp. The anonymous setting of MURILLO'S LESSON (marked "Unknown" in the 1850 Sacred Harp) sets only the final verse of the poem. There would be little sense in printing the entire text twice, as the arranger of p. 358 preferred only the last verse.
I believe that the "second verse" is both out of place and corrupt. The James edition added the Third stanza of the poem to the song (the "first verse is actually the sixth), and altered the words to make it explicitly Christian:
Here, grateful to heaven, with transport shall bring
Their incense, more fragrant than odors of spring.
becomes:
There, grateful to heaven, with transport shall bring
To Jesus, the author of nations, will sing.
Considering the poem as a whole, I would look to an ideology shared by many of the intellectuals of the period, the "westward progression of the arts," wherein the sun sets on old Europe, decimated by warfare and dominated by clergy and aristocracy, which must give way to "new bards and new sages," and the sunrise of a golden or Augustan age of progress and expansion in the West. The Irish philosopher and bishop George Berkeley, who lived in America for several years, foretold this idea in his writings, which were reprinted in Virginia as early as 1763. See the 2019 Arkansas dissertation by Elizabeth Kiszonas at https://scholarworks.uark.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/etd/article/4982/&path_info=Kiszonas_uark_0011A_13592.pdf "Westward Empire: George Berkeley’s ‘Verses on the Prospect of Planting of Arts in American Art and Cultural History."
In the Revolutionary period, the writings of Dwight, John Trumbull, and Philip Freneau all promote this doctrine, which was especially powerful among American Freemasons, who echo the progression of the sun from east to west in a ritual called circumambulation. This is also a major theme of Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution, pp. 209-234 and elsewhere. You can see it clearly in Sumner's ODE ON SCIENCE:
The morning sun shines from the east
And spreads his glories to the west,
All nations with his beams are blest
Where'er the radiant light appears.
So Science spreads her lucid ray
Oe'r lands which long in darkness lay;
She visits fair Columbia, and sets her sons among the stars.....
Before closing, I should mention that the late Dan Brittain wrote a setting of Durham's STAR OF COLUMBIA for concert band. Perhaps one of our illustrious Sacred Harp band directors has seen it or performed it.
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Warren Steel mu...@olemiss.edu
Professor of Music Emeritus University of Mississippi
http://home.olemiss.edu/~mudws/