Few poets have risen so fast and yet fallen as far as Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938). That his elevation to the front rank of English poetry was meteoric is undeniable. Whilst still a comparatively unknown figure, his first pamphlet, entitled Admirals All (1897) and which contained only a dozen poems, sold out of its initial thousand copies in a week. Within the next six months, a further twenty thousand copies had been sold which propelled Newbolt almost overnight to the front rank and he acquired that rare status (at least for poets) of being a household name. In the subsequent decade, he solidified this earlier popularity with three other well-received collections, as well as a collected Poems New and Old which came out in 1912. All of these books often went through various editions and, with the individual verses often appearing first in magazines and newspapers, Newbolt’s latest work was always much anticipated by the reading public. New poems became events. Not for nothing could he boast that, ‘The time even came when Ministers quoted me in the House, and Bishops recited me in sermons at St Paul’s before the King and Queen’ (Newbolt 1932, 203). Even today, lines from ‘Vitaï Lampada’ (including the immortal refrain of ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’) and the rousing ‘Drake’s Drum’ are able to be recalled from memory, and they remain frequently anthologized.
However, despite these successes, and notwithstanding his wider role as a genuine man of letters (he was also a novelist, historian, journalist, and civil servant), to call him today a major poet would be to invite no small amount of derision. Indeed, many have been the damning assessments of Newbolt; David Daiches for example contended that he ‘show[ed] a limitation both in subject matter and in attitude’ (Daiches, 1940, 22) whilst Paul Fussell likewise has argued that his (Newbolt’s) poems are the type for which, ‘words like vicious and stupid would not seem to go too far’ (Fussell, 1975, 250). Most excoriating of all was the assessment of fellow poet and editor John Lucas who saw Newbolt as one spewing forth, ‘an especially nasty kind of Imperialistic jingoism’ (Lucas, 1986, 61). For such commentators Newbolt embodied the very worst aspects of his age, one preoccupied with the preservation of empire, ultra-nationalism bordering on xenophobia, and sentiments of empty bombast. Even his immortal couplet – previously quoted – has come to be vilified for its reduction of war and loss of life to the level of a cricket match: ‘The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,/ And the regiment blind with dust and smoke…But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks/ ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’’ (‘Vitaï Lampada’, lines 11-12, 15-16). The fact that the poem from which these lines derive was an open celebration of public-school virtues has only served to compound their author’s supposed elitism as well as his anachronistic sense of duty and unwavering loyalty to a questionable cause, in this case the preservation of distant colonial assets.
And yet there are, I feel, three compelling reasons why such claims should be resisted and Newbolt’s work re-evaluated. First, popularity must not be dismissed as a virtue. A measure of any poet’s standing (if not always their talent) must surely be in the number of people they reached, for good or for ill. That Newbolt as much as any other poet of his time both shaped and also reflected wider social attitudes would seem incontestable, even if such attitudes are not to contemporary taste. Indeed, Newbolt’s literary influence from the mid-1890s onwards was significant; he was, literally, a ‘new bolt’ as his work offered a stirring, more masculine alternative to the pallid and drooping fin de siecle verses being served up by, among others, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Oscar Wilde. Second, it is necessary to be equally as nuanced when appreciating Newbolt’s sentiments which were far from the straightforward jingoism of his contemporaries, a distinction too few critics have been prepared to make. Although often lumped clumsily together, by common consensus Alfred Austin’s verse was execrable, William Watson fell from grace after the Boer War and became derivative, whilst W.E. Henley had a well-cultivated nasty streak. In contrast, Newbolt was a lithe craftsman whose understanding of rhythm and meter, particularly the music of the ballad, was to be forever well deployed. More often than not he eschewed the pompous bellicosity of many of these other writers, nor did he ever seek to promulgate what today would be seen as unacceptable racial stereotyping. Indeed, as we shall see, his poetry was to articulate a specific and considered personal philosophy which had at its core a strict moral code of behaviour deriving from a sense of national tradition and inheritance.
Finally, and most importantly, we need to recognize that many of the aforementioned critiques, themselves politically motivated, have begun over time to be challenged not least by Vanessa Furse Jackson’s exemplary critical study (1994) and Susan Chitty’s (1997) biography. It has often for example been conveniently forgotten that the arch-Liberal Newbolt leant his support to progressive causes such as Irish Home Rule, social reform, and women’s suffrage. His credentials as a committed champion of Empire are likewise strained when one learns of his preference for a Commonwealth of mutually supportive nations rather than more direct forms of colonial control. His literary tastes were also eclectic, and he admired and promoted writers as diverse as Edith Sitwell, Ezra Pound, and Wilfred Owen. He later too encouraged the cause of progressive forms of education and lead a far from orthodox private life, being triangularly involved with both his wife and her cousin to the point that he kept two separate houses. At the very least, as T.C. Worsley makes clear, ‘We must take Newbolt seriously, because he expressed quite perfectly the feelings and the moral temper of the period…and set the tone for some time to come’ (Worsley, 1940, 88).
Flowing therefore from that spirit of re-appraisal, the purpose of the following article is to consider briefly Newbolt’s contribution to the poetry of the First World War, in particular to explore how it reflected his wider philosophy which was one built upon ancient codes of chivalry and heroism. The poems in question, some of which were published first in newspapers, were written between 1914 and 1918 and collected in a slim volume entitled St George’s Day, and other poems which came out at the end of the War, whilst later editions of Poems Old and New also contained a small number of other pieces composed during this time. In total, Newbolt thus produced only twenty or so ‘war poems’ however it is worth also remembering that any appraisal of this kind must take into account his earlier verses, the best of which which were reprinted during the early months of the conflict, a significant fact which potentially can tell us much about the changing nature of patriotism and fluctuation of literary taste.
In drawing readers’ attention to this body of work – now available as part of a new selection edited by the current author – and considering how it related to a particular view of gallantry and good conduct, it should become possible to reintegrate Newbolt’s war poems into the established canon and allow them to find their proper place. In particular it is important to understand the role the War played in both making and unmaking Newbolt whose initial resurgence in popularity – the patriotism of his earlier poems mirroring the initial mood of national enthusiasm – was to be tempered by a terminal decline in sales and reputation from around 1917. By the end of the War he was no longer simply a Victorian inhabiting an Edwardian era, but an Edwardian swimming against the rising tide of modernity. How and why the War was able to produce this effect is therefore an important consideration. However, before coming to address these wider issues, a little biographical context is necessary.
Newbolt was born in 1862 in Bilston, Staffordshire where his father was a vicar. His early schooling was in Caistor on the Wolds, Lincolnshire and in 1876 the family moved to Bristol as Newbolt had obtained a place at the nearby Clifton College. It was here, under the guidance of the Manx poet T.E. Brown who was one of the masters, that Newbolt began to write poetry. From Clifton, Newbolt won a Classical Scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford where he found an interest in politics as well as his life-long gift for attracting friends across the intellectual spectrum. At Oxford for example he was close to the novelist Anthony Hope as well as the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang. Having left Oxford, in 1887 Newbolt was called to the Bar, where he practised for twelve years. Not long after marrying Margaret Duckworth, who herself had literary connections, Newbolt began to indulge more seriously his ambition for writing. His early works included an adventure novel Taken from the Enemy, set during the Napoleonic Wars, as well as Mordred, a long and prolix Arthurian blank verse drama.
A focus upon King Arthur was not however coincidental and Newbolt, one of whose boyhood passions was heraldry, was coming increasingly to prize very highly the ideals of chivalry, personal sacrifice, and virtuousness. As Mark Girouard (1981) has indicated in his exhaustive analysis, heroic thinking of this type had a long historical gestation and also encompassed the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, especially Edward Burne-Jones, as well as contemporary texts notably Tennyson’s recently published Idylls of the King (1885). Newbolt knew these works well and was to integrate a similar ethic into much of his own writing. Novels such as The Twymans (1911) and Aladore (1914), as well as a retelling of Froissart’s chronicles (1899),were either set in, or had as their main concern, the period of the Middle Ages. The Old Country (1906) even went as far as to transport its protagonist back to 1356 and the reign of Edward III who had earlier founded the Order of the Garter, an association Newbolt saw as begetting codes of personal conduct and honour. Newbolt seemed therefore to be suggesting to his readership that the worlds of the past and the present were bridgeable and commensurate; so explicit was this message that one reviewer was even moved to comment that, ‘Mr. Newbolt desired to demonstrate that our ancestors of the Middle Ages were very much like ourselves’ (The Athenaeum, 8th December, 1906).
Such heroism and valour was reflected tangibly for Newbolt in the actions of various national (invariably military) heroes and many of his early poems, written whilst he was still practising at the Bar, took as their subject the deeds of Francis Drake, Robert Blake, Edward Hawke, and Horatio Nelson. Often these verses were in ballad form, a mode in which he excelled. Such a form was especially apt as these poems showed Newbolt articulating clearly a line of valour and gallantry stretching back through England’s history and which formed part of a national inheritance and tradition. As his own reputation became enhanced, his poems likewise begun to be more widely collected in various small pamphlets, all of which sold well. The fame he accrued enabled him to leave the legal profession and he was soon offered the editorship of The Monthly Review, a post he held until 1904. Under Newbolt this became one of the most distinguished periodicals of its day, including publishing the earliest work of Walter de la Mare. Literature however was but one aspect of the magazine’s focus and increasingly it became a sounding board for digressions on a wider array of issues. One such issue was the complex picture of shifting – and occasionally precarious – geopolitical alliances and speaking, as he saw it, for the nation and as an enlightened Liberal, in a number of editorials Newbolt was to raise the spectre of impending conflict and the way in which this should be entered into: ‘neither are we in doubt as to the spirit in which war should be thought of and when necessary acted upon, or the patience and consideration with which the adversary’s position and feelings should first be considered’ (Newbolt, 1900, 15). The spirit Newbolt was here referring to was that of a gentlemanly code of honour, encompassing a sense of fair play, which he saw as being best cultivated in public schools and that had its origins in the aforementioned Arthurian myth and a folkloric, quasi-Medieval past. It was devotion to this code which came to inform his view of the First World War, a conflict whereby Germany was seen as having broken the accepted rules and not played with a straight bat through her invasion of Belgium and subsequent sinking of the Lusitania.
Newbolt’s enthusiastic attitude to the Navy’s past glories led to an invitation from Admiral Sir Reginald Custance in 1908 to go on manoeuvres with the Channel Fleet, an excursion that was the inspiration for a fine six poem sequence entitled ‘Songs of the Fleet’.In it Newbolt not only prefigured the impending war but also channelled some of that earlier band of brothers spirit: ‘Some day we’re bound to sight the enemy/ He’s coming tho’ he hasn’t yet a name./ Keel to keel and gun to gun he’ll challenge us/ To meet him at the Great Armada game.’ (‘The Little Admiral’, lines 28-31) By 1914, the enemy was of course no longer anonymous and those such as Custance and Fisher were to function in the poet’s mind as modern-day manifestations of the Newboltian hero. Such heroes, as Vanessa Jackson tells us, were not those of the sort adumbrated by Thomas Carlyle – men armed with ‘divine insight into the inner reality of existence’ – but rather as those ‘primarily of action, whose selfless and courageous deeds…provided an inspirational model to emulate’ (Jackson, 1994, 39-40).
With their appeal to a sense of heroic tradition it is then unsurprising why many of Newbolt’s earlier verses were once again popular in the first days of the War. An example of this is ‘The Invasion’, a particularly strong poem seemingly documenting the changing of the seasons with winter seen as ‘invading’ the land prior to the rebirth of Spring
So we wait the delivery;
Surely soon shall he come,
Soon shall his hour be due:
Spring shall come with his greenery,
Life be lovely again,
Earth be the home we knew. (‘The Invasion’, lines 25-30)
When originally published, these words were likely to have been read literally with only a vague suggestion of a political message. Now however, and with an actual adversary to fight, they hinted at a more sinister meaning; Germany may not have been planning for an actual invasion but in her attitudes and outlook she offered, like the hardening winter, an immediate threat to the English way of life: ‘Folk in thrall to the enemy,/ Vanquished, tilling a soil/Hateful and hostile grown’ (Ibid., lines 19-21). In a comparable vein was ‘The Vigil’ – similarly from the late 1890s but also reproduced in The Times in August 1914 – with its patriotic refrain of ‘England! wilt thou dare to-night/ Pray that God defend the Right?’ (‘The Vigil’, lines 23-24). Declarative lines such as these helped therefore to frame the early war effort in terms of a mission, one in which England on the side of fair play and justice, was seen as standing in opposition to those powers who had fallen short in their conduct of an accepted and agreed moral standard .
A consequence of his older work re-entering the public domain in this way was that Newbolt’s aforementionedPoems New and Old went through five new editions whilst magazines and newspapers clamoured to give space for reprints of his best-known verses. His rousing spirit clearly accorded with the initial wave of patriotic fervour and he was well placed to capture and amplify this mood. John Press (1971) has gone as far as to estimate that Newbolt sold over 70,000 copies of his books in the early years of the War whilst never was there a time more in accordance with John Betjeman’s judgement that ‘even the most unliterary of chain bookshops [were] not afraid to stock them’ (Betjeman, 1940, xi).
Of course, Newbolt – fifty-two when the War broke out – was hardly alone in being effusive; Thomas Hardy’s ‘Men who March Away’ and, from a younger generation, Rupert Brooke’s sonnet ‘Peace’ also conceived of the early months of fighting as being akin to a crusade in which names were to be made. For Brooke, as well as for his precocious friend Patrick Shaw-Stewart, a knowledge of Hellenic myths, learned at their public schools, only added to a boyish yearning for battle. Indeed, as Elizabeth Vandiver has shown, such associations were far more widespread than was traditionally thought to be the case, such that a swathe of young writers found in Latin and Greek, ‘a lasting source of imaginative inspiration, so much so that they turned to those languages and their literatures for comfort and for self-expression’ (Vandiver, 2013, 38).
Equally well versed in the classics, Newbolt needs to be similarly understood as being part of this trend, especially through the way in which he continued to draw upon exploits of past valour as a way to contextualize, legitimate, and give meaning to what he observed happening in the present. For him, heroism, stretching back as it did into a distant, imagined past, was therefore part of a shared national heritage, one that, as with any custom, could only be sustained by being passed down from one generation to the next. Of course, it was not uncommon for public-school men to locate themselves within such lineages; in Brooke’s case he had gone as far as to christen his infantry unit travelling to Greece as ‘the Argonauts’. Newbolt however preferred to draw from the wellspring of medieval chivalry rather than ancient myths, and his paeans to those who, ‘cared greatly to serve God and the king,/ And keep the Nelson touch’ (‘Minora Sidera’, lines19-20) are testament to the importance he ascribed to this idea. Crucial to this was the ability of such attributes, especially personal courage and moral rectitude, to be nurtured and transferred. Lest it be forgotten that the title of his most famous poem, ‘Vitaï Lampada’, is best translated as ‘torch of life’, one that was to be handed on in the manner of a relay runner passing a baton.
A more appropriate lens by which to therefore come to terms with Newbolt and his initial view of the War may be through the work of the Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga whose seminal work Homo Ludens (1938, trans: The Playing Man) sought to explore how forms of play had been enculturated within society and could be seen to be reflected in the world of the adult. For Huizinga, play was an often serious business and could involve two antagonists vying for supremacy in contests which were often fought in ‘deadly earnest’ (Huizinga, 1955, 76). War thus fell into the category of an activity manifesting play-like qualities, notably as it was often a contest between equals, whose goal was glory and honour, and which was governed by stringent rules. Chivalry was a key part of this framework and Huizinga argued that this attribute in particular should form, ‘a basis for international law, which is one of the indispensable safeguards for the community of mankind’ (Ibid., 96).
Such ideas provide us with an intellectual framework by which to understand how and why Newbolt saw the War as he did, that is, as a contest between good and evil, right and wrong. The German actions in breaking the rules of the game – the sinking of the Lusitania, the alleged atrocities reported in Belgium – corresponded to those forms of combat Huizinga was to later condemn as not adhering to the ‘war as play’ principle. Such methods included, ‘the surprise, the ambush, the raid, the punitive expedition and wholesale extermination’ (Ibid., 90). These were methods which did not constitute playing the game and whether or not the Germans were guilty of such underhand behaviour was never to impact Newbolt’s initial assessment. In light of this context it is therefore easy to understand why his substantial prose work The Book of the Happy Warrior was to use violent language to summon his countrymen to be trained to fight the ‘wild beasts, savages, maniacs, autocrats and worshippers of Woden’ (Newbolt, 1917, 283).
If, as it later did for Huizinga, war for Newbolt represented a form of adult play it was unsurprising why schools (the places where we play most often) became an important focus of his thinking. Modelling Cyril Connolly’s (1938) Permanent Adolescent, he was to remain devoted to the idea and the ideal of the English Public School. Games such as cricket, rugby, and association football, developed courage, a shared sense of camaraderie, respect for authority, and obeisance to rules. This adherence certainly explains his lifelong affection for his alma mater Clifton College which had a strong sporting culture and retained associations with the military. A poem such as ‘Hic Jacet’, written during the War, captures something of this continuity between boyhood and adulthood: ‘To hear the heathen sweeping/ Over the lands he won; For he has left in keeping/ His sword unto his son’ (‘Hic Jacet’, lines 9-12). Likewise ‘Farewell’, composed around the same time, spoke of preserving sets of values rendered in aspic: ‘To keep the house unharmed/ Their fathers built so fair,/Deeming endurance armed/ Better than brute despair’ (‘Farewell’, lines 7-10).
Indeed, it is within the poems written between 1914 and 1916 that we can glean most clearly the key tenets of Newbolt’s thinking in particular his celebration of the mythic hero, one embodying those highly prized personal qualities and who could play the game of war most successfully. A good example can be seen in ‘The Toy Band’, a poem recalling an incident involving Major General Sir Tom Bridges, the nephew of the poet Robert, at St Quentin, August 27th 1914, in which a retreating battalion are summoned back to fight by the finding of a toy drum and penny whistle:
‘Rubadub! Rubadub! Wake and take the road again,
Wheedle-deedle-deedle-dee, Come, boys, come!
You that mean to fight it out, wake and take your load again,
Fall in! Fall in! Follow the fife and drum!’ (‘The Toy Band’, lines 13-16)
Although only Newbolt could have made a retreat sound like a victory parade, this swaggering ballad ranks among his best: ‘it beats the road to Paradise (the paradise of hope and courage) as well as Valhalla’ (Palmer, 1938, 44). It is telling that, like many of his other works, it appeared first in The Times (on December 14th 1914) at a time when initial optimism over a quick win was waning. Few poets were to do national calls to arms as well as Newbolt. Equally adroit was ‘A Chanty of the Emden’, another ballad-type poem which told of the destruction of the German raider S.M.S. Emden by H.M.A.S. Sydney at the Battle of Cocos (1914):
‘The Sydney she was straddled,
But the Emden she was strafed,
They knocked her guns and funnels out,
They fired her fore and aft:
They fired her fore and aft, my lads,
And while the beggar burned
They salved her crew to a tune they knew,
But never had rightly learned—’
Given his previous association with the sea, this was Newbolt back on familiar territory in celebrating exploits of derring-do. Other similar poems included ‘A Ballad of Sir Pertab Singh’ (who commanded regiments in France at the age of seventy!) and ‘The Service’, a lengthy eulogy for his beloved Royal Navy. Newbolt may have been slightly wrong-footed in assuming the Navy would be the linchpin in any future conflict, but here his sympathies ring true and there were few other contemporary poetic mentions of Jutland in which, ‘Beatty raging with a lion’s might/ roars out his heart the keep the foe from flight’ (The Service’, lines 75-76).
Nevertheless, whilst it is important to appreciate this strand of Newbolt – and the likes of Bridges, Singh and the crew of the Emden were destined to find a place in his gallery of heroes – not all of his war poems were so obviously effusive. In part this was a result of his own maturing style and recent volumes including The Sailing of the Long-Ships (1902) had migrated away from earlier jauntiness and swagger to summon forth more elegiac forms of commemoration. This was reflected in an increasing dissatisfaction with the popular forms of ballad that Newbolt was coming to see as a millstone around both his neck and pen. The War therefore came at a time of continuing personal artistic conflict and, as Patric Dickenson has rightly surmised, ‘[Newbolt] knew what would be expected of him. Perhaps the way to ‘do’ the war, he thought, was ballads, but he no longer wanted to write ballads’ (Dickenson, 1981, 23).
More significantly however wider developments in the continuing War were bringing home to Newbolt the difficulty of reconciling his long-held personal philosophy of heroism with the new and bloody forms of conflict. Working as he did at the Department for Information and then, from 1917, at the Intelligence Department of the Admiralty, as well as counting as close friends men like Douglas Haig and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, meant that he was not cosseted from the unfolding military and strategic realities. Such anxiety was reflected in his own correspondence in which he described ‘the feeling of one bruised head to foot’ (Newbolt to Alice Hylton, April 4th, 1915 quoted in Newbolt, 1942, 203) when both his son and son-in-law were called up to fight. Such concerns were not unfounded; his son Francis was invalided home after being badly injured and later suffered shell-shock.
Something of this ideological transformation and rejection of earlier ideas was captured in the finest and most complex of his war poems – ‘The War Films’. This is (to the best of the author’s knowledge) unique for being a poem about footage of the War, in this instance Geoffrey Malin’s popular documentary on the Battle of the Somme made at the behest of the War Office. Significantly it allowed Newbolt as a viewer to meditate, in its 18 lines, upon not simply the sacrifice made by young men by now most likely dead but also on wider spiritual questions. In the same way that the War forced others including most notably Vera Brittain to question their previously held faiths, so here do we see similar chinks emerging in Newbolt’s orthodox armour.
The sense of this being a lament is apparent from the outset with the repetition of ‘O’ although this is not simply a lament for the sacrifice and heroism shown by the on-screen soldiers. Rather, it served as a threnody for the failure of orthodox religion, as well as its adherents, to truly comprehend the nature of sacrifice which Newbolt suggests is here akin to that of Christ – ‘the faith we had not found’ (‘The War Films’, line 6). This therefore raises an interesting juxtaposition in that a very modern, cutting-edge medium (film and cinema) was seen as providing insights into the most ancient of extant religious creeds, both High and Low Anglicanism – transcendent God in a ‘cloudy Heaven’ or imminent God ‘on earth’ – as well as Catholicism (‘seven sins and his sorrows seven’ refers to the life of Mary). Such creeds had, according to Newbolt, functioned as a ‘ragged cloak’ in that they had obscured ‘the secret of his birth’ which can be taken to mean the true divinity of Christ embodied in his sacrifice, a sacrifice that was echoed by the actions of the soldiers. Film, on this occasion, allowed us to bear direct witness.
The final stanza saw Newbolt, in a quieter timbre, lamenting his inability to make such a sacrifice alongside the men, which parallels his earlier lament for the loss of the true meaning of Christ’s divinity. Outwardly straightforward, this is a more complex poem than may otherwise appear and raises wider questions around the nature of sacrifice and faith. Whilst Newbolt’s regret at not being directly involved was genuine, and one senses he would willingly have fought had he been given the chance, there was nonetheless a deeply felt sense of loss. The poem therefore reflects not simply Newbolt’s personal anxieties but also his own change in attitude to the War; he may never have doubted the righteousness of the cause but it could scarcely now be described in any way as glorious. His heart one feels was no longer in the past.
That the War had such a deep transformative effect upon Newbolt is apparent when we explore his post- 1918 poems. These were few in number and whilst this can be in part attributed to an increasingly busy schedule which saw him further evolve into a very public sort of intellectual which included serving on numerous time-consuming committees, we also need to understand this scarcity as a consequence of the War facilitating more profound changes and challenges to his general world view. His earlier beliefs around the nobility and playfulness of war had been cast adrift and shattered on the rocks of the Western Front. Due in part to the emergence of film, even the very nature of war had become demystified and stripped of its distant, boys’ own, heroic qualities. It was now mechanized, bloody and more obviously brutal, a different world from that celebrated within his early work. Crusade had become sacrifice, chivalry had become survival: ‘The belief in chivalry was still there, but it was a chivalry far from Will Threlfall pounding down the touch line with the rugger ball or Julian Grenfell rejoicing that he had been born ‘at just the right time’. It was a chivalry that was based on the foot soldier rather than the knight’ (Chitty, 1997, 249). Ballads, even ones as expertly crafted as those by Newbolt, had run their course.
Of the few poems he produced in the 1920s two of the most successful, ‘The Nightjar’ and ‘The Linnet’s Nest’, were not only freer in their form but focussed on smaller scale incidents from within the garden of his Wiltshire home. Turning in this way to nature and the microcosmic suggested perhaps the process of retreat from a rapidly changing world. Only one War-related fragment from this period survived, and which was only published in a last posthumous volume. Entitled tellingly ‘A Perpetual Memory’ it serves to echo the core sentiments found within ‘The War Films’ and therefore acts as an appropriately haunting coda:
‘BROKEN and pierced, hung on the bitter wire,
By their most precious death the Sons of Man
Redeem for us the life of our desire—
O Christ how often since the world began!’
Undoubtedly Samuel Hynes was right to make the point that, ‘It [the War] brought to an end the life and values of Victorian and Edwardian England’ (Hynes, 1990, ix) and, as we have seen, one of the most important consequences of that notion was the way in which older conceptions of valour, heroism, and the ‘game of war’, although in intensive care by 1914, were rendered permanently moribund over the next four years. As one of the most important proponents of such ideas, Newbolt too was left behind both stylistically – his popular ballads could no longer compete with the angular modernism of Rosenberg or the weary cynicism of Sassoon – but also as his form of public school rooted patriotism seemed out of step with reality: ‘The disillusioned soldiers who returned [from the fighting]…were weary of martial ardours, weary of patriotism, weary of any kind of emotionalism’ (Palmer, 1938, 43). That he was aware of this transition and that it was captured in his war poems means however that they shine a light on an important consequence of the First World War and the ideological transformations that it evinced. In showing us glimpses of what Britain had been, and also what she had lost, Newbolt surely therefore deserves to re-emerge as an important historical figure and poet.
For more on Henry Newbolt, see John Howlett’s selection available to buy here
A SELECTION OF NEWBOLT’S VERSE
Drake’s Drum
DRAKE he’s in his hammock an’ a thousand mile away,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?),
Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
Yarnder lumes the Island, yarnder lie the ships,
Wi’ sailor lads a-dancin’ heel-an’-toe,
An’ the shore-lights flashin’, an’ the night-tide dashin’,
He sees et arl so plainly as he saw et long ago.
Drake he was a Devon man, an’ rüled the Devon seas,
(Capten, art tha’ sleepin’ there below?),
Rovin’ tho’ his death fell, he went wi’ heart at ease,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
“Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,
Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low;
If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,
An’ drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.”
Drake he’s in his hammock till the great Armadas come,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?),
Slung atween the round shot, listenin’ for the drum,
An’ dreamin arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
Call him when ye sail to meet the foe;
Where the old trade’s plyin’ an’ the old flag flyin’
They shall find him ware an’ wakin’, as they found him long ago!
Hic Jacet
Qui in hoc saeculo fideliter militavit
HE that has left hereunder
The signs of his release
Feared not the battle’s thunder
Nor hoped that wars should cease;
No hatred set asunder
His warfare from his peace.
Nor feared he in his sleeping
To dream his work undone,
To hear the heathen sweeping
Over the lands he has won;
For he has left in keeping
His sword unto his son.
The Linnet’s Nest
O WHAT has wrought again the miracle of Spring?
This old garden of mine that was so beautiful
And died so utterly—what power of earth or sky
From dead sticks and dead mould has raised up Paradise?
The flow’rs we knew we welcome again in their turns—
Primrose, anemone, daffodil and tulip,
Blossom of cherry, blossom of pear and apple,
Iris and columbine, and now the white cistus.
In a round bush it grows, this cistus of delight,
A mound of delicate pure white crinkled petals,
In the heart of the garden, where the green paths cross,
Where the old stone dial throws its morning shadow.
Come nearer, and speak low; watch while I put aside
This thickly flow’ring spray, and stoop till you can see
There in the shadowy centre, a tiny nest,
And on it, facing us, a bright-eyed bird sitting.
She has five eggs, shaped and speckled most daintily;
But this she cannot know, nor how they are quick’ning
With that which soon will be on the wing, and singing
The ancestral linnet-song of thoughtless rapture.
No, this she cannot know, nor indeed anything
That we call knowledge, nor such love and hope as ours:
Yet she for her treasure will endure and tremble,
And so find peace that passeth our understanding.
You wonder at my wonder—the bird has instinct,
The law by dust ordained for that which dust creates?
What then is beauty? and love? my heart is restless
To know what love and beauty are worth in the end.
The bird I know will fly; nest, blood, cistus, garden
Will all be lost when winter takes the world again:
Yet in my mind their loveliness will still survive
Till I too in my turn obey the laws of dust.
Are we then all? Is there no Life in whom our nests,
Our trembling hopes and unintelligent loves
May still, for the beauty they had, the faith they kept,
Live on as in a vast eternal memory?
Yet so for us would beauty still be meaningless,
Mortal and meaningless—our hearts are restless still
To be one with that spirit from whom all life springs,
And therein to behold all beauty for ever.
Perhaps the linnet too is more than dust: perhaps
She, though so small, of so quick-perishing beauty,
Is none the less a part of His immortal dream
And beneath her breast cherishes the divine life.
The Middle Watch
IN a blue dusk the ship astern
Uplifts her slender spars,
With golden lights that seem to burn
Among the silver stars.
Like fleets along a cloudy shore
The constellations creep,
Like planets on the ocean floor
Our silent course we keep.
And over the endless plain,
Out of the night forlorn
Rises a faint refrain,
A song of the day to be born—
Watch, oh watch till ye find again
Life and the land of morn.
From a dim West to a dark East
Our lines unwavering head,
As if their motion long had ceased
And Time itself were dead.
Vainly we watch the deep below,
Vainly the void above,
They died a thousand years ago—
Life and the land we love.
But over the endless plain,
Out of the night forlorn
Rises a faint refrain,
A song of the day to be born—
Watch, oh watch till ye find again
Life and the land of morn.
The Nightjar
WE loved our Nightjar, but she would not stay with us.
We had found her lying as dead, but soft and warm,
Under the apple tree beside the old thatched wall.
Two days we kept her in a basket by the fire,
Fed her, and thought she well might live—till suddenly
In the very moment of most confiding hope
She raised herself all tense, quivered and drooped and died.
Tears sprang into my eyes—why not? The heart of man
Soon sets itself to love a living companion,
The more so if by chance it asks some care of him.
And this one had the kind of loveliness that goes
Far deeper than the optic nerve—full fathom five
To the soul’s ocean cave, where Wonder and Reason
Tell their alternate dreams of how the world was made.
So wonderful she was—her wings the wings of night
But powdered here and there with tiny golden clouds
And wave-line markings like sea-ripples on the sand.
O how I wish I might never forget that bird—
Never!
But even now, like all beauty of earth,
She is fading from me into the dusk of Time
Vitaï Lampada
THERE’S a breathless hush in the Close to night—
Ten to make and the match to win—
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his Captain’s head on his shoulder smote—
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
The sand of the desert is sodden red,—
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; —
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the School is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind—
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
Works cited above.
Works by Henry Newbolt:
Admirals All and Other Verses. Shilling Garland Series, no. 8. London: Elkin Matthews, 1897.
‘After Pekin’ in Monthly Review, 1 (Oct 1900), 15-24.
Aladore. Edinbugh: Blackwood, 1914.
Mordred: A Tragedy. London: Unwin, 1895.
My World as in my Time: Memoirs of Sir Henry Newbolt 1862-1932. London: Faber and Faber, 1932.
Poems New and Old. London: John Murray, 1912.
St George’s Day and other poems. London: John Murray, 1918.
Stories from Froissart. London: Wells, Gardner, Darton, 1899.
Taken from the Enemy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1894.
The Book of the Happy Warrior. London: Longmans, Green, 1917.
The Later Life and Letters of Sir Henry Newbolt. Ed. Margaret Newbolt. London: Faber and Faber, 1942.
The Old Country: A Romance. London: Smith, Elder, 1906.
The Sailing of the Long-Ships and other poems. London: John Murray, 1902.
The Twymans: A Tale of Youth. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1911.
Other Works cited:
John Betjeman, ‘Introduction’ in Selected Poems of Sir Henry Newbolt. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1940, ix-xv.
Susan Chitty, Playing the Game: a biography of Sir Henry Newbolt. London: Quartet, 1997.
Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise. (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1938).
David Daiches, Poetry and the Modern World: a study of poetry in England between 1900 and 1939. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1940.
Patric Dickenson, ‘Introduction: Henry Newbolt 1862-1938’ in Selected Poems of Henry Newbolt. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1981, 11-27.
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981.
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: a study of the play element in culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.
Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London: Bodley Head, 1990.
Vanessa Furse Jackson, The Poetry of Henry Newbolt. Greensboro, N.C. ELT Press, 1994.
John Lucas, Modern English Poetry-from Hardy to Hughes: a critical survey. London: B.T. Batsford, 1986.
Herbert Palmer, Post-Victorian Poetry. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1938.
John Press, A Map of Modern English Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Elizabeth Vandiver, Stand in the trench, Achilles: classical receptions in British poetry of the Great War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
T.C. Worsley, Barbarians and Philistines; democracy and the public schools. London: Robert Hale, 1940.