the discipline of meter 139
through the pause after “Nay,” the line reads in trochees, only forcing one dac-
tyl at the end: “Nay we see well what we [are] doing.” Hardy is far too sophis-
ticated a metrist for me to doubt that he had some idea about what this un-
even, uncomfortable marching song might mean to readers.^77 He refuses to
embrace the dominance of the artificially upbeat iamb, here, and only employs
it when calling attention to the dangers of marching too blindly: “To hazards,”
in line 5, and the “musing eye” “who watch us stepping by / with doubt and
dolorous sigh.” This musing, doubting eye watches the downward steps of the
men who march away with the same kind of reticence that the poet demon-
strates in his downbeat meters. This is not to say that Hardy couldn’t have
composed a more rousing poem, but he equivocates between his sophisticated
and mass readers here. As his thinly veiled autobiography explains:
That the author loved the art of concealing was undiscerned. For in-
stance, as to rhythm. Years earlier he had decided that too regular a beat
was bad art. He had fortified himself in his opinion by thinking of the
analog y of architecture, between which art and that of poetry he had
discovered, to use his own words, that there existed a curious and close
parallel, both arts, unlike some others, having to carry a rational content
inside their artistic form.^78And yet, also in Wessex Poems Hardy had reprinted “The Sergeant’s Song”
(originally published in The Trumpet Major [1880]) with its refrain “rollicum-
rorum, tol-lol-lorum, / Rollicum-rorum, tol-lol-lay!” and its highly regular
beat. For Hardy then, the equivocation about how to appeal to the masses but
maintain a kind of metrical integrity is readable in his wartime poems. Even
when we read the rousing rhythms of Newbolt’s poems as simply emphatic
without reading them in the context of the military metrical complex in which
these poets were participating, we miss the way they were also interested in
prosody and might have figured their ability to participate in more than one
metrical community. We have not known, until now, what to make of these
poems, nor what to make of the thousands that were pouring in from the front
during the First World War. Rather than reading these poems as a way to par-
ticipate in a collective national identity, scholars both then and how have read
them as an affront to the high offices of “Poetry,” a confusion of seemingly
regular meter, militaristic themes, and a wartime notion of Englishness.
The Sound of the Drum
The division in nineteenth-century readers between poetry and verse contin-
ued and deepened in the twentieth century. Though Arnold hoped that mem-
orized poetry would discipline the newly enfranchised masses, the poetry that
circulated in schools was less remarkable for its metrical achievement and