Does our choice of poetry mean patriotism is making a comeback?

Sir Henry Newbolt

I stomped off to our local poetry reading group this evening to contribute “He Fell Among Thieves” by Sir Henry Newbolt. To recap, the poem – his best by a mile, I think – features a young British officer remembering comforting scenes from home as his treacherous Afghan captors prepare to behead him:

...He saw the April noon on his books aglow,

The wistaria trailing in at the window wide;

He heard his father’s voice from the terrace below

Calling him down to ride.

He saw the gray little church across the park,

The mounds that hid the loved and honour’d dead;

The Norman arch, the chancel softly dark,

The brasses black and red…

It is, in effect, a hymn of praise to Great Britain, the Empire, the class system, the family, tradition, the values of service and comradeship taught at public school and Varsity - and it is very moving. I rather expected it wouldn’t go down well with some of my fellow readers, having assumed (for some odd reason) that most modern poetry lovers would be left-wing – but blow me down if at least three of the other performers didn’t beat me to the patriotic punch! What’s going on? Is there something in the air? Anger at defence cuts?  Exasperation at the impertinence of fascistic politicians and their creatures in the media foisting multiculturalism on an electorate which was never asked whether it actually wanted it? Have the English simply had enough of having to apologise constantly - for some unfathomable reason -  for their history, their character, and their attitudes?

Whatever caused this outbreak of synchronicity, it was oddly moving.

I had originally meant to read a poem by James Elroy Flecker – “The Old Ships” – but in a mood of counter-revolutionary fervour, plumped for the Newbolt instead. But another reader chose Flecker’s poignant “Brumana”, in which an Englishman in exile (in the poem, it’s Lebanon, in reality it was Switzerland, where the poet was dying of TB at the age of 31) yearns to see his homeland once more:

Oh shall I never never be home again!

Meadows of England shining in the rain

Spread wide your daisied lawns: your ramparts green

With briar fortify, with blossom screen

Till my far morning -- and O streams that slow

And pure and deep through plains and playlands go,

For me your love and all your kingcups store,

And -- dark militia of the southern shore,

Old fragrant friends -- preserve me the last lines

Of that long saga which you sang me, pines,

When, lonely boy, beneath the chosen tree

I listened, with my eyes upon the sea.

The very next choice was Rudyard Kipling’s “The Roman Centurion Speaks”, in which a soldier who has served in Britain for four decades is ordered back to Rome – but begs to be allowed to remain in the country which has become his true homeland:

I've served in Britain forty years, from Vectis to the Wall.

I have none other home than this, nor any life at all.

Last night, I did not understand, but, now the hour draws near

That calls me to my native land, I feel that land is here.

Here where men say my name was made, here where my work was done;

Here where my dearest dead are laid—my wife—my wife and son;

Here where time, custom, grief and toil, age, memory, service, love,

Have rooted me in British soil. Ah, how can I remove?

For me this land, that sea, these airs, those folk and fields suffice.

What purple Southern pomp can match our changeful northern skies,

Black with December snows unshed or pearled with August haze—

The clanging arch of steel-grey March, or June's long-lighted days?

You'll follow widening Rhodanus till vine and olive lean

Aslant before the sunny breeze that sweeps Nemausus clean

To Arelate's triple gate; but let me linger on,

Here where our stiff-necked British oaks confront Euroclydon!

This was followed by a slight variation on a theme, with a lament from Philip Larkin on the news that more British troops were to be sent home from the colonies as part of a package of defence cuts (sound familiar?). I had never read or heard “Homage to a Government” before, but I was delighted to make its acquaintance: what a stunner!: 

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home

For lack of money, and it is all right.

Places they guarded, or kept orderly,

Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly.

We want the money for ourselves at home

Instead of working. And this is all right.

It's hard to say who wanted it to happen,

But now it's been decided nobody minds.

The places are a long way off, not here,

Which is all right, and from what we hear

The soldiers there only made trouble happen.

Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country

That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.

The statues will be standing in the same

Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.

Our children will not know it's a different country.

All we can hope to leave them now is money.

What an extraordinary talent Larkin possessed for fleshing out awkward, irrational, partially submerged national attitudes – those concepts that won’t quite come into focus because they don’t altogether make sense, but which nevertheless mean something to us. They’re the sort of thoughts that politicians just don’t seem to recognise any more, let alone utter (well, not since Mrs. Thatcher – “There’s no such thing as society” didn’t really make sense, but we instinctively knew what she meant).

The last couplet is quite brilliant: complex concepts expressed with utter simplicity. The lines seem to sum up so much of what’s happened to us in the 39 years since they were first published.

By the time I came to read my poem, I half expected it to be accompanied by some Elgar and for the Union Jack to rise slowly behind me as I reached the end.

I ask again, what is going on?  Whatever it is - let’s have more of it!