the discipline of meter 115
Oh! She’s a true and old land,
This native land of mine.
Oh! She’s a fresh and fair land,
Oh! She’s a true and rare land,
Yes, she’s a rare and fair land 15
This native land of mine.The “song” “My Land” is by Irish nationalist poet Thomas Davis,^18 and so the
addition of “Native” to the title shows the textbook editors are either unaware
that Davis’s land is Ireland, not England, or they are intentionally erasing the
Irish national aim, and by erasing Davis’s name they appropriate the poem
(and the country) into a three-beat English patriotism.
Davis had been praised over ten years earlier in an Irish Quarterly Review
(1855) article as one “gifted with the power to awaken a nation to a sense of its
own position, or to fill the mind of a people with proud consciousness of the
glory which belongs to them.”^19 The reviewer writes that Davis’s poems possess
“everything which ballad poetry ought to possess; a certain happy elasticity of
rythm [sic], irrepressible animation, energetic and appropriate phraseolog y,
and a racy tone which is truly the literary counterpart of the conversational
character of the Irish peasantry” (700). Finally, “unworthy of his country must
he be who can read the inspiring lyrics of Davis without feeling his heart beat
high with patriotic emotion, and without experiencing animative impulsive
sympathy with many of the heroic sentiments which they breathe.” The Irish
Quarterly reviewer singles out Davis’s “ballad” as one that could animate the im-
pulses—the pulses, even—of the Irish peasantry, infusing their veins with na-
tionalist blood and bringing the country to life and glory. Erasing the “nation”
of Ireland from “My Land” and adding “Native” to the title (lifted gently from
the poem’s refrain) specifically affected the impressionable English school
children of 1867. Similarly, readers of Arnold’s 1868 article in The Museum (in
which the poem is reprinted in full) were invited to view the poem as a par-
ticularly unworthy example of what Arnold found “genuine” and “noble” in
poetry. As opposed to Arnold’s view of “poetry,” Davis’s “verse,” even more of a
“ballad” when given an anonymous author by the Chambers editor, inspires
the collective readership in the classroom to feel something, well, collective.
Though Lionel Trilling has argued that Arnold “embraced the whole of the
racial assumption and was at pains to show how the English are an amalgam of
several “bloods”—German, Norman, Celtic,” in his discussion of poetry it is
the subtlety of more subdued accents and more versatile versification that Ar-
nold values in his poetry, even if the poem’s form might display traces of these
various elements.^20 Though Arnold finds Davis’s verses unworthy of the lower
and middle classes in the late 1860s, by the turn of the century patriotic and
heroic verses would infuse the textbooks of the state-funded English class-
rooms, and even Arnold would begin to come around to the Irish Quarterly