Today's poem on Penny's Poetry Blog:
from A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare

Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moon's sphere
[...]

https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2021/07/over-hill-over-dale-william-shakespeare.html

George J. Dance wrote:
>
> Today's poem on Penny's Poetry Blog:
> from A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare
>
> Over hill, over dale,
> Thorough bush, thorough brier,
> Over park, over pale,
> Thorough flood, thorough fire,
> I do wander everywhere,
> Swifter than the moon's sphere
> [...]

> https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2021/07/over-hill-over-dale-william-shakespeare.html

So that's where John Philip Sousa got that great opening line to his song from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Field_Artillery_March#Lyrics

On Saturday, July 10, 2021 at 10:54:03 PM UTC-4, will.d...@gmail.com wrote:
> George J. Dance wrote:
> >
> > Today's poem on Penny's Poetry Blog:
> > from A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare
> >
> > Over hill, over dale,
> > Thorough bush, thorough brier,
> > Over park, over pale,
> > Thorough flood, thorough fire,
> > I do wander everywhere,
> > Swifter than the moon's sphere
> > [...]
>
> > https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2021/07/over-hill-over-dale-william-shakespeare.html
> So that's where John Philip Sousa got that great opening line to his song from:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Field_Artillery_March#Lyrics

On Sunday, July 11, 2021 at 7:18:23 AM UTC-4, Will Dockery wrote:
> George J. Dance wrote:
> >
> > Today's poem on Penny's Poetry Blog:
> > from A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare
> >
> > Over hill, over dale,
> > Thorough bush, thorough brier,
> > Over park, over pale,
> > Thorough flood, thorough fire,
> > I do wander everywhere,
> > Swifter than the moon's sphere
> > [...]
>
> > https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2021/07/over-hill-over-dale-william-shakespeare.html
> So that's where John Philip Sousa got that great opening line to his song from:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Field_Artillery_March#Lyrics
>

Heh! I can't even look at Shakespeare's line without hearing Sousa's tune.

My father was in RCEME (pronounced "Ree-Mee"), the army engineers, and they had a version that I got to hear sung more than once. From memory, I remember the second line was "We will hit the rusty nail", and substituted "RCEME goes" for "caissons go," and they substituted "R-C-E-M-E" spelled out for "field artillery." I suppose other branches of militaries had their own versions.

I never knew it was Sousa's tune, so you got me to look it up and learn something. Sousa wrote the music, but not the lyrics. Here's the story on Military Wiki from Gruber's POV. (Wikipedia tells the same story, but from Sousa's POV.)

"The song is based on the "Caisson Song" written by field artillery First Lieutenant (later Brigadier General) Edmund L. Gruber, Lieutenant William Bryden, and Lieutenant (later Major General) Robert Danford while stationed at Fort Stotsenburg in the Philippines in March 1908.[2] The tune quickly became popular in field artillery units. In 1917 the Secretary of the Navy and army Lieutenant George Friedlander of the 306th Field Artillery asked John Philip Sousa to create a march using the "Caisson Song." Sousa changed the key, harmony, and rhythm and renamed it "U.S. Field Artillery."[3] Sousa didn't know who had written the song and had been told that it dated back to the Civil War. Although an army magazine claims that Sousa passed on his royalties to Gruber,[4] other sources state that Gruber became involved in a prolonged legal battle to recover the rights to music he had written and that had been lifted (unknowingly or not) by Sousa and widely sold by sheet music publishers who reaped profits while Gruber received nothing. The music became so popular that it was also used in radio ads by firms such as the Hoover Vacuum Company. Gruber lost his battle in the courts. They ruled that he had waited too long to complain and that his music was by that time in the public domain. "

https://military.wikia.org/wiki/The_Army_Goes_Rolling_Along