the discipline of meter 137
Englishmen, play the game!
A truce to the League, a truce to the Cup 5
Get to work with a gun.
When our country’s at war we must all buck up —
It’s the only thing to be done!^74The variation between iambs and anapests seems to follow Saintsbury’s char-
acterization—the iambs are mobilized, ready for action, ready for glory. Pope’s
two most prominent anapests here, “with a gun” and “to be done,” make ex-
plicit, along the lines of Newbolt’s later war poems, the morbid ways that glory
is acted out in wartime.
The excitement of poetry used to motivate the country excited Thomas
Hardy, whose poems were reprinted and recirculated even more than Jessie
Pope’s. Hardy’s poem, “Song of the Soldiers,” was published first in the Times^75
in response to Newbolt’s call for patriotic verse. Newbolt was the liaison to the
government propaganda office and Hardy was a participant in the group (in-
deed, he wrote a draft of the poem on his way home from its first meeting ).
The poem was reprinted in a pamphlet by itself a week later; it was popularly
known as “Men Who March Away” and was reprinted in many wartime an-
thologies, including George Herbert Clarke’s popular 1917 A Treasury of War
Poetry.^76 The original title, with its dactyl and trochee, gestures to the falling
march the entire poem emblematizes, but the three-beat rhythms make a
mockery of marching ; the poem stumbles, reluctantly participating in the na-
tional metrical project of easy “English” rhythms and asserting, rather aggres-
sively, that Hardy’s understanding of meter did not necessarily speak to the
same metrical communities as Newbolt’s or Pope’s.
What of the faith and fire within us
Men who march away
Ere the barn-cocks say
Night is growing gray,
To hazards whence no tears can win us; 5
What of the faith and fire within us
Men who march away?Is it a purblind prank, O think you,
Friend with the musing eye
Who watch us stepping by, 10
With doubt and dolorous sigh?
Can much pondering so hoodwink you!
Is it a purblind prank. O think you,
Friend with the musing eye?