matthew bevis
this perspective: ‘so-oldier’drags it out of him, for ‘so old’ is this soldier that his
scepticism about war has degenerated into a luxurious cynicism, as instanced by
the first word of the stanza: ‘When’ should read ‘If’ (after all, this speaker has
survived). The silent young auditor of this dramatic monologue might be forgiven
for feeling that the experienced old-timer is parading his worldliness, showing off
while showing him the ropes.
The imperative to ‘go like a soldier’ also manages to hover between a sardonic and
an ennobling tone. The speaker can be heard as a disillusioned commentator here,
drawing attention to how a soldier’s dying for his country is often an expedient,
messy suicide. In contrast to a classical emphasis on the importance of a proper
burial, we are left lingering on ‘remains’, a gruesome decaying from verb to noun.
Yet, Kipling’s form contains within it another sound: the thrice-repeated ‘Go, go,
go like a soldier’ (itself containing a set of three) might also be heard as a dignified
burial ritual of sorts, the repetitions aligning themselves with the three volleys
traditionally fired over a soldier’s grave by his comrades. And that final metrical
swooping on ‘of’ is a commitment to the pride of belonging. Like so many of
Kipling’s war poems, the speaker’s very insistence on keeping a stiff upper lip
is what lends the piece its air of vulnerability. Such richly compounded accents
bespeak a poetic fighting talk that, although it may include patriotic and militaristic
zeal, also moves beyond it.
Kipling was an important influence on war poetry of the 1890s, although many
poets tended to take their cue from his general defences of the Empire, rather
than from the more provocative insinuations of his soldier-speakers.^90 The 1890s
saw the publication of more anthologies of popular war poetry than any previous
decade, and much of the writing in these collections does not ring true to the
complex achievements of the age.^91 Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vita ̈ı Lampada’ was much
anthologized,anditsrefrain,‘Playup!playup!andplaythegame!’^92 isrepresentative
of the kind of imperial tub thumping that spoke of war as a public school cricket
match in the colonies: ‘There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight—|Ten to
make and the match to win—.’ Yet despite this ‘breathless hush’ and the aspiration
towards indefatigable grandeur in the refrain, there is something disconcertingly
shrill in the tone of this poem and others like it, as if the poet doth protest too
much about the nobility and gentlemanliness of war. At the beginning of the
new century theEdinburgh Reviewlooked back over the Victorian period and
suggested that recent attempts to glorify war were actually reactionary responses
(^90) For a representative selection, see Elleke Boehmer (ed.),Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial
Literature 1870–1918(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
(^91) See e.g. William Ernest Henley (ed.),Lyra Heroica: A Book of Verse for Boys(London: David
Nutt, 1892), which focuses exclusively on ‘the beauty and blessedness of death, the glory of battle and
adventure, the nobility of devotion’ (p. vii).
(^92) Henry Newbolt, ‘Vita ̈ı Lampada’, inAdmirals All and Other Verses(London: Mathews, 1897);
repr. in Boehmer (ed.),Empire Writing, 287.