Nora Hopper Chesson’s “Shame” is a poem of extraordinary psychological force, transforming an inward moral emotion into a speaking, touching, possessive presence. Shame does not appear here as an abstract judgment, a passing blush, or a consequence that follows a particular transgression. Instead, it enters as an intimate companion and claims the speaker with the language of marital devotion. “I love thee so,” it announces, and the sweetness of that declaration is immediately made terrible by its sequel: “I will not ever let thee go.” Chesson’s central imaginative achievement lies in this union of tenderness and coercion. Shame kisses, promises faithfulness, shares food and drink, revives exhausted fires, clings with hands, and ultimately memorializes itself over the beloved’s grave. The emotion becomes not merely a burden but a spouse, a parasite, a muse, a jailer, and a survivor. Such a conception gives the poem its peculiar emotional density: it is frightening precisely because it is not melodramatically distant. Shame is close enough to kiss.

Born in 1871, Nora Hopper Chesson wrote in a period when literary culture was intensely interested in hidden impulses, divided selves, inherited sorrow, erotic danger, and the mysterious life of the mind. An Irish poet associated with the Celtic Revival and with late nineteenth-century aesthetic currents, Chesson often drew upon folklore, supernatural suggestion, sensuous natural imagery, and ballad-like utterance. Her writing belongs to an age in which older symbolic and mythic vocabularies met emerging psychological inquiry. Before psychoanalysis had become broadly institutionalized in English literary culture, poets and novelists were already giving vivid imaginative form to repression, obsession, memory, desire, and self-division. “Shame” participates in this climate, but it does so without clinical terminology. It does not diagnose. It dramatizes. The poem understands that an emotion may acquire a voice and agency within the self, becoming an inward other whose language is inseparable from one’s own deepest fears.

The poem also emerges from a historical world in which shame had enormous social power. Late Victorian and Edwardian cultures placed great emphasis on respectability, sexual propriety, class behavior, religious conscience, and the performance of gendered virtue. Public reputation could be fragile; private feeling was often measured against strict ideals of self-control. Women in particular were subject to elaborate moral scrutiny, their conduct made to stand for family honor, domestic purity, and social order. Chesson’s poem should not be reduced to a simple protest against those conditions, yet its imaginative premise is sharpened by them. Shame speaks in the voice of a devoted wife, an identity conventionally associated with fidelity, care, household continuity, and permanent attachment. By making Shame the “wife,” Chesson turns an idealized domestic bond into a form of emotional captivity. The language of devotion becomes the language of annexation.

The speaker is notably reticent. We never learn what action, memory, desire, or perceived failure has called Shame into being. That withholding is essential. A poem about a named offense might invite readers to weigh guilt, innocence, punishment, or forgiveness. Chesson instead presents shame as a condition that has become independent of any original cause. It is no longer tied to a deed; it has become a relationship. This distinction is crucial. Guilt generally says, “I have done something wrong.” Shame more devastatingly implies, “There is something wrong with me,” or even, “I cannot escape the identity assigned to me.” The poem’s Shame lays claim not to one moment in the speaker’s life but to every domain: labor, appetite, pleasure, artistic or public expression, physical exhaustion, sleep, death, and remembrance. It is totalizing because it has been internalized.

The opening quotation is wonderfully unnerving in its economy. Shame’s repeated “I love thee so” has the cadence of an ardent lover’s insistence, but repetition also gives it an obsessive quality. The phrase sounds less like free affection than like an incantation. It creates the pressure of a voice that has said the same thing before and will say it again. Chesson’s diction, with its “thee,” “thou,” and “dost,” contributes to the poem’s archaic, almost ballad-like atmosphere. This language does not simply make the poem antique. It lends Shame’s declaration an air of ritual permanence, as though the attachment belongs to an old and binding law. The speech resembles a vow, and that resemblance is central: a marriage vow is usually a promise to remain “faithful” through time, suffering, and change. Shame makes exactly such a promise, except that its faithfulness is a curse.

The word “faithful” is especially charged. In ordinary marital language, faithfulness signifies trust, constancy, and moral virtue. Here it means that Shame will never release its hold. The speaker is offered not consolation but permanence. Chesson reveals the dark underside of constancy: what is admirable in love can be intolerable in affliction. This reversal is one of the poem’s most sophisticated techniques. Rather than describing shame through conventional images of darkness, chains, or stains alone, it allows the emotion to borrow the vocabulary of intimacy. Because Shame speaks lovingly, it is more difficult to dismiss. It does not threaten in a crude manner; it promises care. It will be there “all the nights and days of life.” Such availability resembles emotional support, yet it also ensures surveillance. The poem thereby captures the paradox of familiar suffering: an affliction may feel hateful, but it can also become terribly familiar, almost companionable, because it has accompanied the self for so long.

Chesson intensifies this invasion of the self through agricultural and domestic imagery. “The vine and peaches thou dost set / Shall bear my mark, lest thou forget.” Vines and peaches suggest cultivation, fertility, sweetness, abundance, and the rewards of patient labor. They evoke a small, vivid world of tending and harvest, one that might otherwise represent renewal or peaceful domestic achievement. Shame, however, insists on marking these fruits. No labor is permitted to remain innocent of its presence. The phrase “bear my mark” may evoke branding, ownership, or the visible trace of damage. It implies that even what the speaker plants and brings to fruition will testify to Shame’s claim. Forgetting is not allowed. The emotion converts the natural cycle of cultivation into a system of memory.

That phrase, “lest thou forget,” identifies memory as one of the poem’s great subjects. Shame depends upon recollection, but Chesson’s vision is more complicated than a simple inability to forget a painful event. Shame actively produces reminders. It leaves its sign upon fruit, mingles itself with drink, turns laughter into its own music, and plants a final memorial over the speaker’s sleep. Memory is not passive storage; it is a creative and destructive force. The shame-ridden mind finds evidence of its own alleged unworthiness in everything it touches. Achievement does not refute the inward accusation; it is assimilated to it. Pleasure does not provide escape; it becomes another occasion for self-consciousness. In this respect, the poem offers a penetrating account of what modern psychology would call rumination: the repetitive return of a thought or feeling that establishes itself as the lens through which all experience is perceived.

The domestic pronoun “we” is one of the poem’s most haunting elements. “The labour of thy weary hands / We two will eat; we two will drink / Life’s cup.” Shame does not merely observe the speaker’s work from outside. It claims a share in the sustenance produced by that work. The phrase “we two” is tender on the surface, suggesting partnership and mutual dependence. Yet it is also parasitic. Shame consumes what the speaker has earned, and its presence contaminates the very idea of nourishment. “Life’s cup,” a familiar emblem of experience or destiny, is not filled with unalloyed wine. Shame declares, “My tears are in thy cup for wine.” The substitution is devastating. Wine may signify celebration, sacrament, sociability, inspiration, or sensual pleasure; tears are grief made liquid. To drink life is therefore to drink a mixture of existence and sorrow, appetite and self-reproach.

The poem’s sensory textures make this corruption tangible. Chesson does not leave Shame at the level of abstraction. It kisses; it has tears; it laughs; it has hands that cling. It can blow upon dying embers. It is embodied in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish from a lover, a ghost, or an aspect of the speaker’s own flesh. The image of “soul-fires” sinking and Shame blowing “flame up into the brands” is particularly rich. “Brands” are burning pieces of wood, but the word can also suggest a mark burned into the body or an emblem of ownership. Shame revives the speaker’s inner fire, perhaps appearing at first to be a source of energy, but it does so by blowing on branded remnants. The image allows for a disturbing ambiguity. Shame may animate artistic intensity, ambition, or emotional awareness; yet the energy it supplies is inseparable from pain. The poem refuses any easy division between what wounds the self and what stimulates it.

This ambiguity is especially important if the poem is read in relation to artistic vocation. The phrase “when thy hearers for thee wait” suggests that the addressed figure may be a poet, singer, speaker, or performer: someone whose words will be received by an audience. Shame will not “wholly” let this person go even in the act of public utterance. That qualification, “wholly,” is exquisite. It admits the possibility of partial freedom. The speaker may speak, sing, create, and be heard; nevertheless, Shame remains attached. Such a formulation recognizes that public achievement does not necessarily cure private self-division. Indeed, artistic expression can intensify it, since the act of being heard exposes the self to judgment. The poem’s imagined audience is not necessarily hostile, but the very fact of hearers waiting makes visible the vulnerability of expression. Shame is the inward witness that accompanies the artist before external critics even begin to speak.

Here Chesson’s poem may be compared, cautiously and fruitfully, with the dramatic monologue tradition. Like Robert Browning’s speakers, Shame reveals itself through its own rhetoric: it attempts to persuade, seduce, explain, and establish authority. Yet unlike many Browning monologues, the listener remains nearly silent, and the speech is not presented as a confession of a socially identifiable character. The psychological drama has been stripped to its most elemental relation: an “I” addressed by an intimate force. There is also something of the Gothic in the poem’s structure. Shame behaves like a revenant or haunting spirit, but it does not inhabit an old castle or graveyard alone. It settles into gardens, meals, fires, work, and sleep. Chesson thus domesticates the Gothic, locating haunting in the ordinary spaces where a life is lived.

The poem’s allusion to fennel deserves particular attention. In classical and folkloric traditions, fennel has associations with strength, endurance, vitality, and protective or magical power. It was linked in antiquity with Promethean fire and was valued in medicinal and symbolic traditions. When Shame says that no strength in fennel will allow the speaker “to put my weakness from thy mind,” the apparent contradiction is deliberate. Shame calls itself weakness, but this weakness is stronger than any herb of strength. The phrase exposes the irrational authority of self-contempt: one may understand intellectually that shame is debilitating, disproportionate, or inherited, and still find it impossible to expel. Moreover, the reference gives the poem a faintly ritual or enchanted register. The speaker cannot cure this attachment with a charm, an herb, or an inherited remedy. Shame’s power belongs not to the body alone but to the imagination and memory.

“To put my weakness from thy mind” is also a subtle expression of shame’s strategy. It does not say, “You cannot put me from your mind,” which would be more direct. Instead, it defines itself as “my weakness,” as though it were fragile, dependent, and deserving of care. This is emotional manipulation in miniature. Shame adopts the posture of the vulnerable beloved precisely in order to maintain control. Its “hands that cling” may seem pathetic, but clinging can be a means of imprisonment. The poem thereby understands that oppressive emotions do not always appear as powerful tyrants. Sometimes they survive by presenting themselves as wounded, needy, and inseparable from one’s own tenderness. To reject Shame might feel like rejecting a suffering companion; hence the speaker’s captivity is ethical and emotional as well as psychic.

The command “Hate me or love me: I am thine” distills the poem’s vision of possession. The alternatives of hate and love make no difference to Shame’s claim. This is a devastating insight into compulsive attachment: resistance alone does not guarantee liberation. One can loathe an inward habit, a humiliating memory, or an inherited judgment and still remain organized by it. The pronoun “thine” reverses the usual relation of ownership. Shame declares itself to belong to the speaker, but the effect is that the speaker belongs to Shame. It is an emotional inversion that resembles the logic of addiction, trauma, or obsessive thought, in which the sufferer may believe an experience is “mine” while simultaneously discovering that it governs the conditions of selfhood.

The emotional impact of “Shame” arises from its refusal to make its personification simple. Shame is not merely monstrous. It is tenderly articulate, imaginatively fertile, and even capable of something like devotion. That is why the poem feels more troubling than a straightforward allegory of evil would. Chesson understands that emotions which damage us can become woven into our identity. They may preserve memories we fear to lose; they may seem to guard us against further humiliation; they may lend intensity to our work and vigilance to our moral lives. The poem does not celebrate this condition, but neither does it sentimentalize recovery through a sudden act of will. The speaker’s silence makes the power imbalance palpable. Shame controls the language, names the relationship, interprets the future, and determines the terms of remembrance.

The final movement reaches beyond life into burial and legacy. Shame imagines the speaker’s “sleep,” a traditional euphemism for death, and promises to plant above it “Rowers that shall my memory keep / When thou art earth in earth below.” The word “Rowers” is unusual and suggestively ambiguous. It may evoke a planted memorial, perhaps through a variant or resonant association with rowan trees, which possess rich folkloric significance in Celtic and northern European traditions as trees of protection, enchantment, and remembrance. It may also be read more literally as a strange image of motion or passage, figures who continue to move over the stillness of the grave. Whatever precise botanical or symbolic association one emphasizes, the larger point is clear: Shame intends to survive its host. It will establish a visible sign over the dead speaker, converting burial into a monument to itself.

The phrase “earth in earth below” is solemn and elemental. It reduces the human body to matter returning to matter, but it also produces a resonant doubleness: the speaker becomes both a person buried in the ground and earth indistinguishable from earth. This is one of the poem’s few gestures toward a cosmic scale. Against such material dissolution, Shame claims memory. The body may disappear, but the marking force will endure. That fantasy reflects the dread that humiliation or self-condemnation can outlive the self in reputation, art, family memory, or imagined judgment. Yet there is a tragic irony in Shame’s desire for memorialization. It needs the speaker in order to be remembered. Even as it claims mastery, it reveals its dependence. Shame’s voice is powerful because it attaches itself to a human life; without that life, its “memory” would have no object.

A comparison with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s treatment of shame is illuminating. In The Scarlet Letter, public stigma is materially visible in the embroidered emblem Hester Prynne must wear, while inward shame takes different forms in the psyches of Hester, Dimmesdale, and the Puritan community. Chesson condenses such social and spiritual drama into a single intimate speaker. Her “mark” is not imposed by magistrates or sewn on a garment, but it appears on vines and peaches, in cups and songs, in the speaker’s own imaginative world. The poem therefore shifts the emphasis from public punishment to internalized surveillance. A person need not stand on a scaffold to feel watched; the judging presence may become so thoroughly absorbed that it speaks from within.

Later philosophical accounts of shame can also clarify Chesson’s achievement, even though the poem precedes them. Jean-Paul Sartre famously describes shame as an experience in which one encounters oneself through the gaze of another. Chesson’s poem deepens this insight by making the gaze tactile, domestic, and enduring. Shame is not simply an external observer who catches the self in an embarrassing moment. It is a lover who shares the household of consciousness. Similarly, modern distinctions between guilt and shame help reveal the poem’s severity. Guilt may invite reparation because it concerns an act. The Shame of Chesson’s poem offers no clear route to reparation because it does not articulate a charge. Its possession is more radical: it is attached to being rather than doing.

Yet the poem’s darkness should not obscure its artistic vitality. Chesson’s language is compressed but expansive in implication, joining garden and grave, body and soul, nourishment and sorrow, private intimacy and public utterance. The poem’s emotional logic develops through images rather than exposition. We feel the burden of Shame because we see it sharing the speaker’s harvest, adulterating the wine of life with tears, fanning the fire of the soul, and fastening its hands around the beloved. This is poetry’s special power: it does not merely announce that shame is pervasive. It makes pervasiveness sensuous. The reader can taste it in the cup, see it in fruit, feel it in the clinging hands, and hear it in the repeated declaration of love.

“Shame” remains compelling because it recognizes that the most painful emotions are often not experienced as isolated intruders. They become intimate structures of consciousness, speaking in familiar language and promising a cruel kind of fidelity. Chesson’s poem is unsparing in its vision of that bondage, but its very clarity offers a form of recognition. To give Shame a voice is not necessarily to endorse its authority; it is to expose the rhetoric by which it rules. The poem’s great achievement is to make an invisible inward force dramatically present while preserving its ambiguity, seductiveness, and terror. Its final effect is haunting not because it presents shame as a simple darkness, but because it shows how darkness can learn the gestures of love, and how poetry can illuminate even that most difficult and intimate of shadows.

Jessie Pope’s The Call stands as one of the most emblematic—and now controversial—poems of the early phase of the First World War. Written at a time when British society was swept up in patriotic fervor and idealized conceptions of military service, the poem functions simultaneously as a recruitment appeal, a moral exhortation, and a cultural artifact that crystallizes the values, assumptions, and emotional tenor of its moment. Though brief in form, The Call encapsulates a worldview now largely discredited by war’s subsequent horrors, yet its historical significance, rhetorical force, and literary construction merit close scholarly scrutiny. To understand this poem fully is to grapple not only with its surface-level jingoism but also with the complex interplay of gender, duty, national identity, and emotional manipulation that characterized much of the propaganda of its era.

At the core of The Call lies a direct, almost theatrical address: a series of questions posed to an imagined young man—“my laddie”—designed to elicit a response that is as much emotional as it is volitional. The poem’s speaker, implicitly female, adopts a tone that is both coaxing and accusing, blending maternal affection with peer-like camaraderie. This dual voice is not incidental; it reflects the gendered dynamics of wartime mobilization, wherein women were often cast as both guardians of domestic virtue and enforcers of masculine honor. The repeated invocation of “my laddie” personalizes the call to arms, transforming what might otherwise be an abstract civic duty into an intimate challenge. It is not the state or the military that summons the young man—it is a familiar, affectionate voice that implies betrayal if he refuses.

Historically, The Call emerged in 1914–15, during the early, euphoric phase of the Great War, when enlistment was still voluntary in Britain and public discourse was saturated with rhetoric of adventure, glory, and moral righteousness. The poem first appeared in newspapers and later in Pope’s collection The Call: and Other Poems (1915), which became immensely popular among the British reading public. At the time, Pope was a well-established journalist and poet known for her light verse and children’s poetry, and her wartime poems, including The Call, were widely reprinted and recited. Her work resonated because it distilled complex national anxieties and aspirations into accessible, emotionally charged language that spoke directly to the middle-class sensibilities of the era.

Culturally, the poem draws on deep-seated Victorian and Edwardian notions of heroism, masculinity, and imperial duty. The references to “the Empire’s thanks” and “the victor’s ranks” situate the conflict not merely as a defensive war but as a noble crusade to uphold British global supremacy. This imperial framing was critical to the war’s early appeal, particularly among the educated classes who saw service as both a patriotic obligation and a means of affirming Britain’s civilizational mission. The poem’s invocation of “banners and rolling drums” evokes a triumphant return—a procession that celebrates not just victory but moral superiority. In this vision, war is not chaos but ceremony; not slaughter but spectacle. The defeated or hesitant man, by contrast, is reduced to the grotesque image of one who “stand[s] and bite[s] his thumbs”—a gesture of impotent shame, borrowed perhaps from Shakespearean idiom but here recast as the ultimate social disgrace.

Pope’s deployment of rhetorical questions is perhaps the poem’s most potent literary device. Rather than stating outright what the young man should do, she forces him—and by extension, the reader—into a position of self-interrogation. Each stanza presents a binary: action versus inaction, courage versus cowardice, participation versus exclusion. The questions are not neutral; they are loaded with moral implication. To “fret to begin” is virtuous; to “want to save his skin” is suspect. To “long to charge and shoot” is healthy ambition; to “rather wait a bit” is weakness. The cumulative effect is a kind of emotional blackmail, where refusal to enlist is framed not as a reasoned choice but as a failure of character. This technique exploits the psychological vulnerability of youth, especially young men raised in a culture that equated masculinity with physical bravery and public service.

It is worth noting that the poem’s emotional impact hinges on its use of colloquial diction and rhythmic urgency. Phrases like “keen on getting fit” and “show his grit” reflect the everyday language of schoolboy ethos and sporting culture, thereby aligning military service with familiar, socially approved activities. The informal register—“my laddie,” “Do you?”—creates a sense of camaraderie, as though the speaker is merely reminding the young man of values he already holds. This rhetorical strategy blurs the line between persuasion and peer pressure, between civic appeal and social coercion. The poem does not invite debate; it forecloses it by presenting enlistment as the only morally and socially acceptable response.

In contrast to the later war poets—most notably Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg—Pope offers no glimpse of mud, blood, or psychological trauma. There is no trench warfare in The Call, only the romantic abstraction of “the trench” as a site of honor. The absence of realism is not a failure of imagination but a reflection of cultural timing and intent. Pope wrote before the full horror of industrialized warfare became widely known, and her audience had not yet been disillusioned by reports of stalemate, mass casualties, and bureaucratic incompetence. To judge her poem solely by the standards of post-1916 poetry would be to misunderstand its function and context. The Call belongs to a specific historical moment—one of collective optimism and moral certainty—that would soon be shattered by the Somme and Passchendaele.

Indeed, the poem’s later infamy stems largely from its juxtaposition with the anti-war verse that followed. Owen’s famous poem Dulce et Decorum Est, written partly as a rebuke to “my friend” (widely interpreted as a reference to Jessie Pope), explicitly counters the romantic illusions that poems like The Call helped propagate. Where Pope speaks of “banners and rolling drums,” Owen describes “blood-shod” soldiers “coughing like hags.” Where Pope frames war as a test of character, Owen reveals it as a dehumanizing machine that grinds men to dust. The contrast is stark and deliberate, and it has shaped much of the modern reception of Pope’s work. Yet this binary reading—jingoist versus truth-teller—risks oversimplification. Pope was not a cynical manipulator but a product of her time, writing what her culture demanded and believed. Her poem must be understood not as a lie but as a symptom—a cultural expression of a society not yet ready to confront the reality of modern war.

Biographically, Pope’s life and career complicate the caricature of her as a mere propagandist. Though she is now best remembered for The Call and similar poems, she was a prolific writer whose work spanned journalism, children’s literature, and light verse. She supported the war effort wholeheartedly, as did many women of her class and generation, but she also later advocated for veterans and wrote sympathetically about the war’s impact on families. Her later work shows a more nuanced understanding of loss and sacrifice, even if it never approached the searing honesty of Owen or Sassoon. To dismiss her entirely is to ignore the broader cultural matrix in which wartime poetry operated—a matrix that included both celebratory and critical voices, often coexisting in tension.

Philosophically, The Call raises enduring questions about the ethics of persuasion in times of national crisis. Is it ever justifiable to appeal to shame, peer pressure, and social conformity to recruit soldiers? Does patriotic poetry have a responsibility to truth, or is its function purely motivational? These questions remain relevant in contemporary discourse about media, propaganda, and the moral economy of war. Pope’s poem, for all its simplicity, engages with these issues implicitly by framing enlistment as a moral imperative rather than a political choice. The “laddie” is not asked to weigh strategic considerations or ethical dilemmas; he is asked whether he is the kind of man who acts—or watches. In this framework, neutrality is not an option; it is a failure of identity.

Moreover, the poem’s emotional resonance—however problematic by modern standards—cannot be denied. It speaks to a deep human desire to belong, to be recognized, to prove oneself worthy of admiration. These impulses are not unique to wartime; they are fundamental to the construction of selfhood in any society. Pope taps into them with remarkable efficiency, using poetic form not to explore ambiguity but to resolve it in favor of action. The poem’s power lies not in its complexity but in its clarity: it offers a single, unambiguous path to honor, and any deviation from that path is marked as shameful. In a world increasingly aware of moral gray areas, such certainty can be both seductive and dangerous.

It is also instructive to place The Call within the broader tradition of martial poetry. From the epics of Homer and Virgil to the ballads of the Napoleonic Wars, poets have long glorified combat as a crucible of virtue. Pope’s poem fits squarely within this lineage, albeit in a modern, mass-media context. What distinguishes her work is its domestic intimacy—the sense that war is not a distant affair of kings and generals but a personal test for every young man. This democratization of heroism was characteristic of early twentieth-century nationalism, which sought to mobilize entire populations rather than just professional armies. In this light, The Call can be seen as part of a larger cultural project to redefine citizenship in martial terms.

Yet even within its own historical moment, the poem was not universally embraced. Critics at the time noted its simplistic morality, and some soldiers reportedly resented the implication that they had gone to war for glory rather than duty or necessity. The poem’s tone—breezy, almost playful—struck many as incongruous with the gravity of war. This dissonance reveals a key tension in early wartime culture: the gap between the rhetoric of sacrifice and the reality of suffering. Pope’s poem attempts to bridge that gap by making sacrifice seem exhilarating and socially rewarding, but the attempt relies on a suspension of disbelief that the war itself would soon shatter.

In conclusion, The Call by Jessie Pope is far more than a relic of misguided patriotism. It is a finely tuned instrument of emotional persuasion, a cultural snapshot of a society on the brink of disillusionment, and a testament to the power—and peril—of poetic rhetoric in times of crisis. Its themes of honor, duty, shame, and belonging continue to resonate, even as its assumptions have been overturned by history. To read it today is to engage with a vanished world of moral certainty, one that believed in the redemptive power of war and the clarity of masculine virtue. The poem’s enduring value lies not in its truth but in its honesty about the illusions that animate nations in the early throes of conflict. In studying The Call, we do not merely confront a piece of propaganda; we confront the mechanisms by which societies summon their young to die—and the voices that, for better or worse, make such summons seem noble. Poetry, at its most potent, does not just reflect culture; it shapes it. And in 1915, few poems shaped British wartime culture more decisively than this deceptively simple call to arms.