the discipline of meter 129
poetic with the “wheedle” of the whistle and the “rubadub” of the toy drum,
Newbolt’s infantilizing war scene in the service of idealizing and glamorizing
the power of music and poetry (indeed, his own power as a poet of wartime)
seems violently out of place; a cartoonish, audaciously false presentation of the
happy soldier, “cheerly” singing along.
“The Fourth of August: A Masque,” a poem full of “love of country” and
“freedom that lives by service,” and which closes the volume, reverses this
move in a stage note: “A funeral march is heard: the Boy beats his drum to it
and turns to go . . . the funeral march changes to a high triumphant move-
ment.” The “natural,” self-sacrificing drumbeat pulse and impulse has finally
Figure 2. “The beat of it got into the dead men’s pulses.” In Henry Newbolt, Tales of
the Great War. Originally published by Longmans, Green, and Co. in 1916 (with 7
color plates and 32 illustrations in black and white, by Norman Wilkinson and
Christopher Clark), p. 185.