118 chapter 4
metrical intimacy to civilize is a crucial benefit, for Arnold, of good English
poetry.^26
The poetry Arnold derides contains what becomes rhythmic ideologies
that are present in the songs and chants that accompanied military—some-
times called metrical—drills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries. Military drills had been introduced in schools as early as 1871 and were
hugely popular in the Edwardian era. The popularity of discipline and drill
in state-funded elementary schools, private grammar schools, and “public
schools,” has been the subject of many studies by J. A. Mangan, who argues
that game culture is part of the general rise of an English culture of masculin-
ity based on school sport.^27 This masculine centrism and the insertion of tacti-
cal prowess into education presages the increased militarism of pedagogical
methods. Mangan often uses Newbolt’s poetry as an example of military ath-
letic culture, particularly his famous poem, “Vitae Lampada,” which equates
war to a public school cricket match. John M. Mackenzie, Pamela Horn, and
Stephen Heathorn have looked at drill culture as inculcation into a national
identity tied crucially to the empire.^28 The Earl of Meath, who founded the
“Lad’s Drill Association” in 1895, also founded the “Empire Day” move-
ment that Horn and Tricia Lootens^29 note, flourished in the Edwardian era as
a result of the pervasive insecurity about the physical degeneracy of English
soldiers after the failures of the Boer War. Though military drill in schools
promoted a very different kind of discipline than that which Arnold imagines
for recitation, I am interested in the moments when physical discipline (drill
marching ) and mental discipline (recitation) join together. The “National
Service League” movement of the Edwardian era began around the passage of
the 1902 Education Act, which reintroduced the study of classics as a subject
in the national language classroom. General Earl Roberts pleaded in protest
that compulsory classical subjects be replaced with compulsory military drill
in schools^30 ; Saintsbury and Roberts exchanged quite a few letters and Rud-
yard Kipling published a tribute to him in 1914, titled “Lord Roberts,” which
included the lines “Never again the war-wise face, / The weighed and urgent
word / That pleased in the market-place — / Pleaded and was not heard!”^31 Its
militaristic aspects, as well as the way poetry could be used in the direct ser-
vice of the nation, were highly relevant in the period from the Boer War until
the First World War and were, indeed, a disciplinary aspect of the imperial
project.
Even before the turn of the century, rhythmic movement and imperialist
sentiment were joined in slim volumes containing physical exercises intended
for school use. Veronica Vassey’s Tiny Verses for Tiny Workers (1898), is one
such handbook. The books usually included a “gun drill” for boys, to be prac-
ticed with wooden rifles, and “fan” or “scarf ” drills for girls. Boys’ drills also
included wooden exercise dumbbells, and both boys and girls marched, were