Few battle poems begin with so little swagger. Moore's speaker simply tells his comrade, "To-morrow, comrade, we / On the battle-plain must be," and the choice ahead is blunt: "to conquer, or both lie low." Then he glances at the sky, notes that "the morning star is up," and reaches for the wine. The whole poem works this way. Duty and fear sit side by side, and the speaker keeps courage afloat by refusing to dwell on the second. The central idea is that bravery here is not the absence of grief but a decision to march through it, helped by a cup, a song and a good deal of brisk talk.
The most memorable moment is the "weeping" goblet. The speaker admits that "in manliest eyes / A passing tear will rise," then asks what good wailing does. His answer is a small piece of wit: the cup is crying too, so "with its tears we'll chase away our own." Wine becomes a stand-in for sorrow, and drinking it becomes a way of getting rid of grief. The joke is brave, and it is also a little desperate. The tears are acknowledged, and then drunk.
The third stanza shows how thin this cheerfulness is. Time presses in ("daylight's stealing on"), and the speaker remembers that the last light saw "our children around us play." He starts to ask, "ah! where shall we / And those rosy urchins be?", and the question never gets an answer. The dash and the flat "But -- no matter" cut it off, and he turns to the sword. The rhyme helps here. In the first stanza, "we / be" sounded like a resolution. Now the same rhyme carries a question he cannot bear to finish. "Rosy urchins" is affectionate, almost teasing, and that tenderness makes the pretended indifference of "no matter" hurt more.
The form suits all this. Each stanza has seven lines, and they run in tight couplets and triplets (we/be, up/cup, on/shone). The lines are short and bounce along with a rhythm close to a march, or a tune a group could stamp to. The sense of a song is strengthened by the refrain. Each stanza ends by repeating its last line with the address dropped: "ere we go, boy, go" becomes "ere we go," and "away, boy, away" becomes "away!" The echo sounds like a chorus joining in. It also sounds like a man saying something twice to convince himself. Those "boy"s, tucked in mid-line, give the speaker the tone of an older soldier steadying a younger one.
The last stanza turns from private feeling to public cause. The speaker sneers at men who "brook the chain / Of Saxon or of Dane" and "ignobly by their fire-sides stay." Here the hearth, which was the place of the children and the "friends we leave lone," becomes a symbol of cowardice. The speaker will allow himself exactly "one sigh" and "one heartfelt prayer," a strict ration of emotion, before the shout of "hurra! hurra! hurra!" The stanza also breaks the pattern. In the first three stanzas the closing line rhymes with the third line (low/go, lone/own, play/away). In the fourth, "stay" is answered by a cheer instead of a rhyme, as if feeling has finally spilled past the form.
The subtitle, "Time — the Ninth Century," puts the scene in the distant past, with "Erin" as the cause being fought for. Moore was an Irish poet who wrote songs, so it is reasonable to suspect, though the text alone does not prove it, that this distant setting allows a patriotic message to be delivered at one remove. Whatever its purpose, the poem is significant for what it avoids. It could have been a simple recruiting song full of glory. Instead it lets us hear the doubt under the drum, and it shows that the courage on offer is the kind that knows exactly what it is risking.