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noticed that the placards for the St. James’s Gazette in which the poem was
published bore “two words only, in enormous capitals: as if it were the beat of
the Drum made visible” (186). Capitalizing the word “Drum” here aligns the
legend of the drumbeat with the legend of the general himself, enmeshing na-
tional duty with national rhythm.
Many critics have argued that Newbolt’s popularity and the popularity of
patriotic poetry in general was due to the rise of militarism at the turn of the
centur y,^53 and the “verbal symbols of ideological commitment” to the great
public schools.^54 Newbolt’s poetry further attuned that audience, troping the
drum and a natural ability to hear and follow rhythm as essential aspects of
English military history, glory, and sacrifice; thus, reading and “feeling” En-
glish poetry through its rhythm (perhaps even a hazy understanding of its
meter) was conceived of, by Newbolt and others, as an essential aspect of En-
glish citizenship. Though Drake’s legend was taken up many times by other
poets in the Edwardian period,^55 it was Newbolt who turned the old wives’ tale
into a legend that emblematized, through a rewriting of English history, how
a rhythm could inspire military heroism and sacrifice. Newbolt himself was
impressed by the popularity of the poem, recording in his autobiography the
many times that readers contacted him to tell him that they heard the actual
drum, both at the close of the Boer war and the close of the First World War.^56
The drum, then, in its Edwardian and Georgian uses, is not only the historical
legend of Drake’s unifying rhythm but, in the poem itself, an example of the
unifying rhythms imagined in all English poetry that calls citizens to collective
action.
In Newbolt’s poems leading up to and during the First World War, the
drumbeat shifts from one of national duty to a more specific march toward
death, the ultimate sacrifice. In “The Song of the Guns at Sea,” dated 1909, and
published in the 1916 Poems, New and Old,^57 Newbolt subdues the regular
ballad meters of his earlier nautical poems:
O Hear! O hear!
Across the sullen tide,
Across the echoing dome horizon-wide,
What pulse of fear
Beats with tremendous boom? 5
What call of instant doom
What thunderstroke of terror and of pride
With urgency that may not be denied
Reverberates upon the heart’s own drum?
Come! . . . Come! . . . for thou must come! 10Here, without the actual drum of rhythm, Newbolt tries to achieve a kind of
echoing repetition. When that fails, he evokes the echo of a drum sound in the