While Three Men Hold Together

“While Three Men Hold Together” is a refrain from Swinburne’s Song in Time of Order that accompanies Richard Ellsworth Savage as he plans to leave the war and imagines writing for revolt. Its two linked lines make solidarity sound both intimate and politically consequential: three men hold together, and kingdoms are reduced by three. Recalled while he packs and then heard anew in the rumble of a French train, the refrain bridges a solitary act of departure and a larger fantasy of resistance.

Wording and Political Possibility

The refrain is presented as a couplet: “While three men hold together” followed by “The kingdoms are less by three.” Its first line makes togetherness the condition for what follows. The opening “While” leaves the statement suspended in time: the kingdoms diminish for as long as the men remain united. The second line converts that personal bond into a political consequence. The text does not specify which kingdoms are meant or explain how three men can make them less; the force of the couplet lies in the abrupt scale of its claim, moving from a small human group to the powers that govern it.

The repetition of “three” binds the lines together and makes the political reckoning sound almost arithmetical. Yet the couplet gives no practical program. It offers instead a memorable proposition that can be carried in the mind and made to serve a new purpose. In Richard Ellsworth Savage’s thoughts, the verse is not merely remembered: it becomes part of his desire to write poems that might rouse people against their governments. The song’s compactness suits that aspiration. A few words give solidarity an outcome, even if the means of achieving it remain unstated.

A Refrain on the Road

The words return while Richard Ellsworth Savage is packing books and other belongings into a duffel bag and carrying it toward the Gare d’Orleans. He has bought a pocket compass after seeing it in a Rue de Rivoli jeweller’s window, and he has formed a plan: acquire civilian clothes, leave his uniform on the wharf at Bordeaux, and cross into Spain. The refrain accompanies this preparation, placing a remembered piece of verse beside the practical objects and movements of departure. His immediate project is escape from what he experiences as a nightmare; the words in his head give that project a collective and political horizon.

Once aboard the train, he imagines living in a sun-scorched Spanish town and sending out poems and manifestoes that call young men to revolt against their “butchers.” He pictures secret presses publishing the work around the world. This is a daydream, not an accomplished campaign: the narrative shows him absorbed in the imagined future, scarcely attending to the suburbs of Paris or the farmlands passing outside. The refrain’s presence therefore marks a change in scale within his own thinking. A route across a border opens into a vision of writing that could travel far beyond the writer himself.

The Train as Chorus

The refrain does not remain a silent thought. The train’s “rumblebump rumblebump” seems to chant it, as though the words were being muttered in unison by a marching crowd. The passage turns mechanical motion into a collective voice without suggesting that an actual crowd is present. The sound of travel appears to answer the remembered lines, giving them a pulse and a public character. What began as verse in one man’s mind seems, for a moment, to have many voices behind it.

That transformation matters because Richard Ellsworth Savage is physically alone with his plan, but imagines his poems summoning other people into action. The refrain supplies an image of precisely that union: a small number holding together strongly enough to unsettle larger powers. The train carries him away from Paris while its rhythm makes the couplet seem to advance alongside him. The sound does not prove that his imagined revolt will occur; it gives his fantasy an audible form and makes the private memory feel momentarily shared.

Recollection and Interruption

The refrain’s recurrence also organizes the passage. It first accompanies the practical work of packing, then returns as the train seems to chant it. Between those appearances, Richard Ellsworth Savage builds an elaborate picture of exile and revolutionary authorship. The repeated couplet holds that imagined future together, linking movement through the landscape with an ambition to send words outward. Its return is not a new plan or a report of political action, but a renewed emphasis on the idea that united people can diminish the power of kingdoms.

At noon, hunger draws him away from the daydream: he leaves his seat to eat a final deluxe meal and encounters a young man in a French officer’s uniform. The scene’s immediate turn from inward political fantasy to appetite and unexpected recognition places the refrain within a larger narrative moment that does not remain under its spell. Its significance is concentrated in the passage of departure itself. It gives Richard Ellsworth Savage’s planned escape a language of solidarity, while the train’s apparent chorus briefly makes that language sound larger than one person’s hope.