Extract

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.

The Poet: Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938)

Henry Newbolt was born in 1862, the son of a Staffordshire vicar. He was educated at Oxford and practised as a lawyer, writing novels and patriotic, romantic verse such as that collected in Admirals All (1897). A devout Christian and a firm believer in the value of tradition, he served in the Admiralty and Foreign Office as Controller of Telecommunications during the First World War, and went on to become a strong establishment figure, serving on many commissions, councils and committees while continuing to write. He was knighted in 1915. His work can be compared to that of his contemporary Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book, Kim, and the poem 'If'; Kipling's writing, like Newbolt's, belongs to an era when British imperialism was at its most confident.

The Poem

'Vitaļ Lampada' is Latin for 'Torch of Life', as most of the schoolboys and young men for whom this poem was written in 1897 would have known. At that time the British Empire was the major global power and Britannia really did rule the waves. Attitudes towards nationality, race and class have changed enormously since then, and reading the poem today requires a certain leap of the imagination. The function of poetry has also shifted. There was certainly more of a feeling then that poetry had an important public function; whereas today poetry more usually deals with private visions. Poems such as this one were committed to memory, learnt by heart, and used as moral guides in times of difficulty.

'Vitaļ Lampada' is a highly purposive and moral poem. It aims to teach a moral lesson and provide a guiding principle for the conduct of life. It is possible to imagine its audience as young men educated in public schools who were needed to command or govern in the British colonies. But it probably also has a wider meaning, valuing tradition and personal discipline for the sake of the whole society.

The first stanza is set on the school cricket fields. The team is in a difficult situation - 'Ten to make and the match to win' - and the poem suggests that learning to be a team player is better than thinking of personal gain - 'not for the sake of a ribboned coat'. In the second stanza, those men who may once have been boys playing cricket are now in a foreign land facing an even more difficult situation - 'The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead'. In the bitter reality of the battlefield, the poet tells us, the principles of selflessness learnt on the school cricket pitch still hold good - 'But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks: / "Play up! play up! and play the game!"'

The final stanza makes a plea for the values of continuity and tradition and discipline learnt at school to be handed down from generation to generation - 'And falling fling to the host behind'. In the modern individualistic world, where social customs and traditions have had to change rapidly to keep pace with technological change, 'play up and play the game' may seem a rather quaint and old-fashioned moral. Yet one might wonder whether the England squad might have fared better in World Cup 98 if David Beckham had taken the moral lesson of this poem to heart!

What the Students Said

Sabina, Calder High School, Mytholmroyd - Passwords 1998

Sabina, Calder High School, Mytholmroyd - Passwords 1998

Ed Gowan, Eton College - Passwords 1998

Hamid Khanbhai, Eton College - Passwords 1998

What Simon Armitage Said

Simon Armitage - Passwords 1998