the discipline of meter 125
and Poems, New and Old (1913-17), and in countless newspapers and war an-
thologies. “Drake’s Drum” resembles one of Kipling’s “Barrack-Room Bal-
lads,” many of which also contain references to soldiers responding to drums.^49
Unlike Kipling’s verses, however, Newbolt’s have none of the “deep ambiva-
lence about what Victoria’s soldiers were actually fighting for.”^50 In the first
stanza of “Drake’s Drum,” Drake is “in a hammock and a thousand mile away”
as he dreams “arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.” The poem is easy to read, and
before the drum is even introduced, Newbolt varies the first paonic ballad
meter with a line that demonstrates thematically how all activities on the ship
take place in a steady, rhythmic drum time: “An’ the shore-lights flashin’, an’
the night-tide dashin.’” All activities (dancing, lights flashing, the tide) take
place in rhythmic time with the drum and with the sturdy, alternating four-
and three-beat verses, but this line, with its internal rhyme and mirrored three
beats, evokes its own ordered echo within the poem.
In the second stanza, when Newbolt shifts the meter from first paeons to
tighter trochees before the mirrored three beats, it is in Drake’s voice: “Take
my drum to England, hang et by the shore, / Strike it when your powder’s run-
nin’ low” (ll. 13–14). He then increases the beats again in line 15, as if to imi-
tate the more somber cadence that the drum might produce were he actually
needed: “If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’Heaven / An drum
them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago” (ll. 15–16). Here, to
“drum” is to punish and to “drum” the Spanish invaders up the channel is to
“beat” them in battle. The first stanza, then, metrically performs the orderly
dancing to Drake’s drum before his death, and the second metrically performs
the drum and the enemy’s defeat. In the final stanza, he is “listenin’ for the
drum” and we are instructed to “call” for Drake in times of national need:
“Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound, / Call him when ye sail to
meet the foe; / Where the old trade’s plyin’ an’ the old flag flyin’ / They shall
find him ware an’ wakin, as they found him long ago!” Any Englishman can
“call” on this legend and he will respond “up the Sound.” The legend of Drake’s
drum, written here, evokes the continuity of English loyalty through the ages
but also, importantly, likens that legend of English military glory to the ability
to hear and repeat a sound.
The poems in Admirals All and This Island Race were learned by heart,
chanted, and sung across England, the Empire, and beyond, with American
and English periodicals publishing most of his poetic work during the next
year.^51 Admirals All first appeared in Elkin Matthews’s series, The Shilling Gar-
land, in 1897 and ran through four editions in two weeks and twenty-one
editions before The Island Race was published in 1898. Even before the books
were published, individual poems circulated in the Gentleman’s Magazine, the
Spectator, and the Pall Mall Gazette. Newbolt records in his memoirs My
World as in My Time how the publication of the poem “Drake’s Drum” itself
acted as a drum, responding and helping the nation in a time of crisis^52 ; he