matthew bevis
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumminglike a noise in dreams.
Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching, all to die.
East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.
Far the calling bugles hollo,
High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
Woman bore me, I will rise.^105In his study of the literature of war, Andrew Rutherford quotes Arnold Kettle’s
assertion that ‘the refusal to be heroic may be very human, but it is also less than
human’ before noting that ‘literature which explores this paradox deserves more
critical attention than it currently receives’. The endorsement of the quiet life in the
pastoral code should not play down the heroic life of action, he explains, because
‘heroic virtues are needed to protect the innocence of the pastoral world from the
violence and evil which would otherwise destroy it’.^106 Victorian war poetry is often
responsive to this insight, and Housman’s speaker on the idle hill acknowledges
even as he would seem to resist it. The poem is a rich compound of competing
voices; the lines ‘Dear to friends andfood for powder,|Soldiers marching,all to die’,
for instance, play off two of the most renowned commentators on war’s absurdity
and its necessity, Falstaff and Hotspur. The first allows room for Falstaff’s sense of
the hollowness of war in his comment on the soldiers as mere ‘food for powder’,
yet the second is perhaps responsive to Hotspur’s sense of the honour of war
in his call to the men, ‘die all, die merrily’.^107 Neither voice is fully persuasive
(Falstaff can sound expediently unprincipled, and Hotspur blithely inhumane),
but their dialogue stages questions that Housman is frequently intent upon asking
about war. Like the speaker ofMaud, haunted by the march ‘with banner and
bugle and fife’, this speaker’s move to rise manages to sound both decided and
exhausted, and the call of the bugles is itself rendered ambiguous as Housman’s
arch rhyme (‘hollo/follow’) gets to work on it; within the greeting ‘hollo’ one
begins to hear something ‘hollow’. Indeed, it is not clear what the speaker’s ‘rising’
portends—rising up to join the soldiers, or rising against them by moving further
away.
(^105) Housman, ‘XXXV’, inAShropshireLad, ibid. 59.
(^106) Andrew Rutherford,The Literature of War: Five Studies in Heroic Virtue(London: Macmillan,
1978), 2 and 9.
(^107) William Shakespeare,The First Part of King Henry IV,iv. ii. 62 andiv. i. 135.