Browning's "Epilogue"

[Tepa]

I admire, but confess I've never fully understood, Robert Browning's final poem, "Epilogue". I'm writing an article on Ezra Pound which will require me to make complete sense of this poem. Since 'Epilogue' has been praised in these forums, I assume someone out there will be able to help me out. I take the poem (perhaps incorrectly) to be addressed to a loved one who will survive Browning after his death, but I am puzzled by the line 'Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be' in the final stanza.

Any insights would be vehemently appreciated. Here's "Epilogue":

AT the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time,
When you set your fancies free,
Will they pass to where—by death, fools think, imprisoned—
Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so,
—Pity me?

Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken!
What had I on earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel
—Being—who?

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.

No, at noonday in the bustle of man’s work-time
Greet the unseen with a cheer!
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
“Strive and thrive!” cry “Speed,—fight on, fare ever
There as here!”

[Whifflingpin]

"breast and back" is usually, and I think here, breastplate and backplate, the two main pieces of armour.

In the third verse, life is presented as a battle, in which defeats are not admitted to be final. In the last verse the battle is carried on beyond death, which should be met with a war-cry (not, hearking back to the first verse, as a matter for pity)

I think the "him" in "bid him forward" is the (spirit of) the dead one - the "he...who once so loved you" from the first verse.

I think that's the gist, but no doubt there are other interpretations.

[Tepa]

Ah, 'breastplate and backplate'. Thanks so much!

In an early essay mentioning this poem Pound uses the word 'war-cry' as you have done.

I suppose I'm still uncertain about 'as either should be'. I wonder whether to take 'either' as somehow meaning 'both' (as it does in, for example, 'rings on either hand'), so that a rough paraphrase might be something like 'Bid him forward, armored both front and back, as one should always be'--or perhaps the meaning is 'fully-armored as both of us (living and dead) should be'?