Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and patriotism

could keep even the poet's own literary dreams of a British warrior-empire
alive.

VI

"The voice of the hooligan": the phrase, famously applied to the works of
Rudyard Kipling, by Robert Buchanan's scathing 1899 review, might more
accurately describe those of Kipling's great admirer W.E. Henley. 52 To
read Henley is to recognize why early-twentieth-century critics often
found not only Kipling but also Tennyson hard to take. For though
Henley's "dismal," "teeming," or thoroughly abstract imperial "junior
Englands" (WEH, 236, 231, 237) are as far from the '"igh inexpressible
skies" of Kipling's karoo as his callous soldiers are from Kipling's absent-
minded beggar, Henley's patriotic poetry distills the warmongering, xeno-
phobia, and misogyny of its models, even as it annexes their righteous
rhetorical energy.

No work is more important to this project than an 1890 poem dedicated
to Kipling, "The Song of the Sword." Created by God, before Adam and
Eve, and "Edged to annihilate, / Hilted with government," Henley's Sword
calls men to "Follow, O, follow me, / Till the waste places / All the gray
globe over / Ooze" with the "sweetness" of blood, then "Give back in
beauty / The dread and the anguish / They had of me visitant" (WEH
33-34). In "Pro Rege Nostro," perhaps the most popular poem of Henley's
Boer War volume For England's Sake (1900), what Richard LeGallienne
calls Henley's "sword-evangel" 53 becomes explicitly British: here the nation
is not only the "Mother of Ships" and the "Chosen daughter of the Lord"
but also the divine "Spouse-in-Chief of the ancient Sword" (WEH 231). At
her best, Henley's nation is the "Mother of mothering girls and governing
men" ("Envoy" WEH 242), an "everlasting Mother" who demands "the
lust and the pain of battle," so that "the One Race might starkly spread"
("Last Post" WEH 239). At her worst, she excels even the corrupting
female peacetime corporeality of Maud. Tennyson's drunken Peace may
lounge "slurring the days gone by" his "Mammomite mother" may kill her
child for money (ATI. 33, 45); but in Henley's "Epilogue" England itself
"hangs," "in a dream / Of money and love and sport," "at the paps / Of
well-being, and so / Goes fattening, mellowing, dozing, rotting down / Into
a rich deliquium of decay" (WEH 240-41). "War, the Red Angel" alone
can save such a nation (241).

Henley actively promoted the association of his own vein of violent
abstract nation-state erotics with Hemans, Kipling, Tennyson, and other
Victorian poets well into the twentieth century. His anthology, Lyra

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