John Manifold's fife and boots.(Literature)(Poem)

 
FIFE TUNE 
 
For Sixth Platoon, 308th I. T.C. 
 
   One morning in spring 
   We marched from Devizes 
   All shapes and all sizes 
   Like beads on a string, 
   But yet with a swing 
   We trod the bluemetal 
   And full of high fettle 
   We started to sing. 
 
   She ran down the stair 
   A twelve-year-old darling 
   And laughing and calling 
   She fussed her bright hair; 
   Then silent to stare 
   At the men flowing past her--There 
   were all she could master 
   Adoring her there. 
 
   It's seldom I'll see 
   A sweeter or prettier; 
   I doubt we'll forget her 
   In two years or three, 
   And lucky he'll be 
   She takes for a lover 
   While we are far over 
   The treacherous sea. 

I GREW UP on British Army garrisons and so can recall from about the age of five the metric equivalents made by soldiers' hobnail boots on a macadam surface.

On the parade ground I listened to the crisp spondees of the quick march. When the order came to slow-march, this crunch-crunch became a more deliberate, withheld pattern, "sprung" crunches perhaps. But whenever, in my boyhood's far-flung war games, I encountered a platoon route-marching on a back lane of the Rheindahlen garrison, or proceeding along a wharf of the Hock van Holland for embarkation to England and their demob, I heard a more informal swing in the rhythm of that boot-music:

 
   Dit dah dit dit dah 
   dit dah dit dit dah dit 
   dit dah dit dit dah dit 
   dit dah dit dit dah 

The iambs and anapaests in this music sometimes clicked with an extra-unstressed "dit". But the pattern, while suggesting the step was the easier gait for long-haul marching, still had the invariant two principal beats to match the fall of the two boots on the road surface while the clickety supercharge of unstressed syllables created an echolalia of boot falls for the informality of the march.

John Manifold's poem establishes the presence of those two boots as the base of both its music and its meaning. At the same time its loosened pattern of unstressed syllables communicates both that twenty-mile-a-day rhythm as well as the quick fife tune itself, gambolling with the insistent two beats in the same moment it accentuates them.

Indeed, the intelligibility of "Fife Tune" is perhaps three-quarters conveyed without having to think about the role that actual vocabulary plays in this delicate and wholly achieved lyric. The words are attracted, like polarised particles, to the metrical pattern rather than that pattern being contrived around the intellectual charge of the words. As such, "Fife Tune" has the animus, and some of the conventions, of popular song; one recognises that girl and her hair from at least one American folksong.