A website – restoreouranthem.ca — is set to go live this week, with endorsements from former prime minister Kim Campbell, author Margaret Atwood, Senator Nancy Ruth, former senator Vivienne Poy, and Sally Goddard, mother of Nichola Goddard, the first female Canadian soldier to be killed in combat, in Afghanistan in 2006.
The campaigners are seeking to have Robert Stanley Weir’s lyric, “in all thy sons command,” replaced with “thou dost in us command.” They argue that those were the original English lyrics that Weir altered to more gender specific words before the First World War.
“It’s not a change, it’s a restoration,” Nancy Ruth said Monday.Maybe so, but it's a really crappy, archaic, tin-eared one. To the modern ear, "dost" sounds like "dust," especially when sung. So in effect we'd be singing "thou dust in us command." And since there's a natural inclination to want to make the "dust" and "us" rhyme, we could even end up singing, "though dust in ust command," which makes no sense whatsoever.
If we absolutely must fiddle with the anthem--and, personally, I think for tradition's sake we should leave it alone--there's a pretty obvious fix that would do away with the "dost" but retain the meaning: "True patriot love/In us you do command."
Surely Margaret Atwood, who after all is an acclaimed poet (the gender neutral term for "poetess"), could have suggested it.
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