reilly 235

250. NEWBOLT, Henry. ST GEORGE'S DAY & OTHER POEMS. 1918.
Inscription on front end paper. £10.00


Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938) was one of the Edwardian "Great Men," and a close friend of General Sir Douglas Haig, whom he "first met when they were students together at Clifton College, whose cricket field provides the scene of Newbolt's first stanza [of his poem "Vitai Lampada"]" (Fussell, 26). Newbolt's belief in the values inculcated in the public schools, the virtues of self-abnegation, good sportsmanship, and "playing the game" (whether in life or in battle) is dramatized in poems such as "Vitai Lampada" ("They Pass on the Torch of Life") -- written before the war, but seemingly anticipating the coming need for selfless sacrifice for loyalty and duty. (The falling torch image in "Vitai Lampada" also appears in John McCrae's famous "In Flanders Fields.") Another "sporting" poem of the war is the anonymous "Cricketeers of Flanders." (For this "sportsmanship" mentality taken to its illogical extreme -- that is, to kicking soccer balls toward the "goal" of the enemy trenches -- click here to see Paul Fussell's account in The Great War and Modern Memory; see also Michael Foreman's War Game for a children's book on the subject).


Vitai Lampada written after the British square was broken in the Sudan

He appears in The Jewish Contribution To Civilization 1940 p.137 edited
by C.A. Stonehill with a preface by the wonderful Viennese writer
Stephan Zweig.