Sounds and Sweet Airs

I've been listening, quite obsessively, to the British hymn "I Vow to Thee My Country". I've mentioned the hymn in connection to a fabulous movie ("Another Country") on the blog some time back but I've most recently revived an interest in the hymn because it moves me in ways that make me suspicious and worried about who (or what) I am.
Ok, this basically means that listening to the hymn makes me teary. Earlier this week, as I listened to it on YouTube, I was just downright weepy. Here's the version that moved this hard heart as well as the lyrics:

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,

Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;

The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,

That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;

The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,

The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,

Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;

We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;

Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;

And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,

And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

Now, what intrigues as well as irritates me, is how such a nationalistic hymn of jingoism that subordinates choice and freedom to that old lie and masks imperial ambition as obedience to a higher call moves me to tears. Even if the imperial ambitions of the hymn are outmoded the comments on the YouTube video attest to the fact that the hymn stirs lots of feelings of patriotism. (I even saw a comment on another video of the hymn that said "we will have the empire again ... "). An old verse that is now no longer included in hymnal versions of the song underscores the virulent and violent nationalist sentiment that the existing verses make very little effort of concealing:

I heard my country calling, away across the sea,

Across the waste of waters she calls and calls to me.

Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,

And round her feet are lying the dying and the dead.

I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns,

I haste to thee my mother, a son among thy sons.

The use of the hymn in the film Another Country is smart precisely because it questions the values of sacrifice in the name of imperial expansion. Yet I also found myself emotionally stirred when the hymn's melody (from Holst's "Jupiter" and also known as "Thaxted") was used at key points of the blatantly propagandistic film Roaring Across the Horizon, a Chinese film about China's superhuman and successful attempts to develop the 原子弹 (do I have that right?) In that film, Holst's theme swells in the background every time the Chinese manage something amazing -- like flattening the uneven, sandy ground of the Gobi desert with huge rollers driven only by raw manpower, calculating with abacuses what the Americans and Soviets could work out only with the aid of computers, and, of course, firing off the bombs.

Adding another dimension to this question of why I am so strangely moved is the fact that Holst's uplifting and majestic theme really comes in the middle of a very different piece of music. The "Jupiter" movement of Holst's The Planets is also subtitled "The Bringer of Jollity" and its opening strides, as well as the rest of the movement really do create a rather light-hearted atmosphere with its quick tempo and playful call-response accents of the woodwinds and brass: some of it sounds like incidental music for an old Western. Placing the sweeping grandeur of this middle section against the frivolity of the rest of the movement conveys a message that is quite different from the hymn's rather straightforward appropriation of the stirring melody. Especially interesting in thinking about the musical context of the Thaxted theme is the way it returns with the low brass toward the end of the movement, gets taken up by the trumpets but then gets shuffled, unresolved, into the rest of the movement's final seconds.(Here's a video of the entire movement).


So, my question revolves around how someone whose developed so many defenses against nationalistic feeling goes to pieces at something so flagrantly 'patriotic'. Worse, it isn't even 'my own country' that we're talking about here but a wholly irrational response to some vague (but nonetheless dangerous) feeling of .... I don't even know what to call it. Perhaps the idea of sacrifice just gets me. I'd be interested to know if anyone else is strangely moved by the hymn and if they can put a finger on why.