At first hand, this slim lightweight booklet about the national anthem looks like an essay turned into a booklet, a slight excursus such as one would expect at university level.

Instead, we think we know the national anthem because of the many times we may have sung it, but this booklet by Professor Oliver Friggieri shows how little we know about it. Maybe too, as I will say later, there is more to study and to discover in the national anthem than what Prof. Friggieri dug out.

Ours is not the only national anthem that is a prayer to the Almighty – the British for instance, have their God Save the Queen, while the Spanish have music but as yet no words.

What makes ours unique is the fact that it was words fashioned to suit already existing music rather than the other way around.

In 1921, after the 7 June 1919 riots and the granting of a new Constitution to Malta, Dun Karm Psaila, (the national poet) was already trying his hand at a poem with national fervour. Yet, as a priest, he had to remain neutral between the impassioned political parties.

It was not easy, in those troubled times, to be in favour of your country, with the British interested only in keeping Malta within the British Empire.

Although Dun Karm wrote a patriotic poem, 1921, this was not the national hymn he had in mind as something he would want to write.

The right occasion came some time later. In 1921, Dun Karm was chosen as the assistant librarian at the National Library and he promptly left his teaching job and took on this new role, henceforth living among books.

At around this time, two other persons were engaged in a quite different search. Robert Samut, a doctor whose real interest was music, had been studying at the University of Edinburgh and his fellow students asked him, one day, to sing for them the Maltese national anthem. Dr Samut somewhat shamefacedly had to admit Malta did not have, as yet, its national anthem.

Then he wrote some music, his contribution for a possible national anthem and he gave it to Dr A. V. Laferla, the director of Education. Dr Laferla, in his turn, passed it on to Dun Karm.

Dun Karm knew something about music and he had a piano at his residence (at that time in Old Bakery Street, Valletta, today marked by a marble plaque). By dint of playing it over and over, Dun Karm got to understand its inherent rhythm and structure and it was to this that he fashioned his words.

According to Toni Cortis, the national anthem was played for the first time on 27 December 1922.

Prof. Friggieri, a poet and a Dun Karm devotee, analyses the text of the national anthem with care and attention to detail. For all we think we know the words, there are many aspects we would have never guessed at were it not for Prof. Friggieri pointing them to us.

Listening over and over to the music, Dun Karm realized that only a hendecasyllable would fit the music. A hendecasyllable is described as “a line whose last accent falls on the 10th syllable. It therefore usually consists of 11 syllables; there are various kinds of possible accentuations . It is used in sonnets, in ottava rima, and in many other works. The Divine Comedy, in particular, is composed entirely of hendecasyllables, whose main stress pattern is fourth and 10th syllable”.

This is not the most popular metric in the European verse, nor in Malta, not even in Dun Karm’s previous poetry.

The most frequently encountered metre of English verse is the iambic pentameter, in which the metrical norm is five iambic feet per line, though metrical substitution is common and rhythmic variations practically inexhaustible. The iambic pentameter is the English equivalent of the continental hendecasyllable.

John Milton's Paradise Lost, most sonnets, and much else besides in English are written in iambic pentameter. Lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter are commonly known as blank verse.

Blank verse in the English language is most famously represented in the plays of William Shakespeare and the great works of Milton, though Tennyson (Ulysses, The Princess) and Wordsworth (The Prelude) also make notable use of it.

Prof. Friggieri goes on and on about the metre of the national anthem, and one would expect him to, even though not all would be able to follow his detailed analysis.

Even more riveting is Friggieri’s textual analysis. The anthem consists, as we all know, of two three-line stanzas. There are a number of comparisons to be made.

In the first stanza, for instance, the structure is based on the Latin model, as mediated through Italian, but the words, in the entire anthem, are rigorously Semitic. The words are simple, everyday use, words easily understood by all.

The first stanza is homely, soft, as within a family, where the father (God) takes care of the mother (Malta). The verbs are in the past.

The second stanza changes tone: it becomes political, the structures of society, with workers and employers, the just born institutions of the fledgling state. The tenses are in the future.

As the author concludes: “In these six verses, Dun Karm encapsules the Maltese character: the Christian religion, the Semitic language, the European culture.”