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FIGHTING TALK:
VICTORIAN WAR
POETRY
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••matthew bevis
Victorian war poetry is often engaged in conflict with its own form, rather than
with an external enemy. Browning’sDramatic Lyrics(1842) begins with a series
of apparently belligerent ‘Cavalier Tunes’, but readers approach them armed with
a note from the volume’s advertisement. There the poet observes that most of
the poems are ‘though for the most part Lyric in expression, always Dramatic
in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine’.^1
‘Cavalier’, then, may be a lyrical-dramatic pun: the soldier-singers are proud to be
voicing their support for Charles I, but the poet who creates these voices asks us
to consider whether they are themselves cavalier. A later poem in the collection,
‘Incident of the French Camp’, focuses on the potential consequences of such
fighting talk. The speaker recalls a moment when Napoleon’s army, pursuing the
Austrians, stormed Ratisbon under the command of one of the Emperor’s most
renowned generals, Jean Lannes. Napoleon looks on:
Just as perhaps he mused ‘My plans
That soar, to earth may fall
Let once my army-leader Lannes
Waver at yonder wall,’
Out ’twixt the battery-smokes there flew(^1) Robert Browning, quoted inThe Poetical Works of Robert Browning, iii, ed. Ian Jack and Rowena
Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 178.