Thomas Hardy's poetry - study guide
Introduction
I have written this study guide for students taking GCE Advanced level (AS and A2) courses in English literature, and other comparable literature courses. It is suitable for undergraduates and the general reader who is interested in the study of poetry. This guide was originally written to cover a selection of poems prescribed as a set text for exams at GCE Ordinary and GCSE level. But it can be used as a way in to the study of Thomas Hardy's poems generally.
About Thomas Hardy
Hardy lived from 1840 to 1928. He was the son of a mason, from Dorset, in the south west of England. He studied to be an architect, and worked in this profession for many years. He also began to write prose fiction. His first effort (The Poor Man and the Lady) was never published, but his second novel was published in 1871. This was Desperate Remedies. It was not well-received, but the next book, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), did better. Hardy eventually published many novels - these vary in merit but include many which are established as masterpieces of English fiction: Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure.
Hardy enjoyed commercial success, but his work proved controversial, and his publishers continually tried to tone it down. Critics savagely condemned his last two novels, Jude and Tess (as they are abbreviated for convenience). Hardy no longer needed to write prose fiction for a living - the royalties from his existing work gave him more than enough security. He had always preferred poetry - and believed that he was better as a writer in this form. He wrote verse throughout his life, but did not publish a volume until Wessex Poems and Other Verses (for which he did his own illustrations) appeared in 1898. Hardy certainly made up for lost time, eventually publishing six collections of verse as well as the huge poetic drama, The Dynasts, of which the first part appeared in 1904.
Thomas Hardy was married twice - his first marriage, long and mostly unhappy, was to Emma Gifford. They married in 1874. Emma died in 1912, and in 1914 Hardy married his secretary, Florence Dugdale, who later became his biographer. Hardy died in 1928, aged 87. He had asked to be laid beside Emma, but his body was buried in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. Only his heart was placed in Emma's grave - or was it? There is a curious story that his housekeeper placed the heart on the kitchen table, where his sister's cat seized it, and ran off into the nearby woods. In this version of events, a pig's heart was duly buried beside Emma.
War poems
Hardy wrote poems at the times of the second Boer War of 1899-1902 and the Great War of 1914-1918. Some poems obviously reflect these particular conflicts (Drummer Hodge and Channel Firing, for example). But others, though written at the time, have a more general relevance - such as The Man He Killed and In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”. This is not accidental - Hardy explicitly tried to relate specific historical conflicts to a wider historical scheme. He attempted to do this in a grand or epic poetic drama of the Napoleonic Wars - The Dynasts (which has three parts, nineteen acts and one hundred and thirty scenes). In this he also relates the great moments of history to the lives of ordinary people.
Hardy's war poems show a great diversity of attitude. We cannot, on their evidence alone, identify a clear-cut opinion of war to which Hardy keeps consistently. Channel Firing presents a horribly pessimistic view of man's bellicose stupidity. In Time of “The Breaking of Nations” is triumphantly optimistic in asserting the fact that the good things of everyday life will survive when wars are long forgotten.
The Going of the Battery captures the sadness (for those left behind) that war brings, but no criticism of war is stated or implied. The reference to “Honour” in the fourth stanza suggests that the soldiers' cause is worth fighting for.
In Drummer Hodge, while he shows the tragedy and waste of war, and perhaps implies that Hodge's sacrifice is rendered futile by his ignorance of the land over which he is fighting, yet Hardy makes no explicit criticism of war.
In The Man He Killed, on the other hand, Hardy's skilful device of the narrator's vain attempt to justify his action is an obvious indictment of war, as it is clear that he has no reason to kill his “foe”.
The Going of the Battery
This poem is about what happens when a group of soldiers and their field guns leave for service overseas. The guns collectively are the “battery” of the title, though this noun normally includes also the men who operate them - an artillery company. They are travelling by train to a port of embarkation for service overseas - probably South Africa, and the poem appears to have a setting at the time of the second Boer War.
The sub-title points us to the fact that a narrator (who is one of the deserted wives) speaks the poem. Hardy's concern in this poem is not really with war as such, so much as with the effect on the wives of the departure of their men folk. The poem is written in the first person as if spoken by the wife of a soldier: this is evidence of Hardy's trying to see the situation through the eyes of the women so deeply affected by the leaving of the men.
The jaunty rhythm, internal rhyme (in the first and third line of each stanza) and frequent alliteration ( “through mirk and through mire”; “great guns were gleaming” ) echo the brisk marching pace of the soldiers. However the highly contrived rhyme and the stilted (artificial) syntax to which it leads (as in the penultimate stanza) make the narrator's mode of address seem somewhat unnatural. We do not (as we do with The Man He Killed) have a clear and immediate sense of the narrator's character.
Commentary
Stanza 1
Knowing that soldiers are “light in their loving” (inconstant), the narrator acknowledges how foolish she and her friends have been to choose such men as husbands, even without the additional hardship of losing them to uncertain battle in a distant country. Note the internal rhyme: “sad ... mad”, “choosing ... loosing”. This will recur in every stanza.
Stanza 2
Undeterred by the driving rain the women walk through the blackness and through the mud underfoot. The despondency of the women as they trudge along is contrasted with the enthusiasm and eagerness of their men folk “stepping steadily - only too readily!” , almost as if the men do not realize that the swifter their pace, the sooner will come the parting from their wives. This fact does not apparently cross the soldiers' minds, or, if it does, they are not unduly concerned about it.
Stanza 3
“There” in the first line, is not identified, but is evidently a station or point of entrainment (getting on the train). To the narrator's eye, the field guns, draped in tarpaulins, resemble monstrous animals: “living things seeming there”. This personification (or more precisely animation) of the guns is developed by the references to mouths ( “upmouthed” ) and “throats”: an apt image not only because they are round and open, but also because, though they are yet still (“blank of sound” ) they are “prophetic to sight” . We can see that they will, in due course, be heard.
Stanza 4
The gas-light, obscured by the driving rain, sheds faint and eerie light on the faces of the wives ( “pale” both because of the faint light, and because they are chilled and fearful) as they wait for a farewell kiss and embrace their men, entreating them ( “a last quest” = a last request) not to seek danger which can honourably be avoided: to be brave but not foolhardy.
The use of the word “court” may be inadvertent on the narrator's part, but Hardy evidently is aware of the sense in which the army is a rival of the wives for the affections of their men, who “court” danger in battle as eagerly as they might once have in a literal sense courted their wives and sweethearts.
Stanza 5
The train, bearing all the men of the battery, ( “all we loved” ) moves out, and the women sigh audibly, their eyes blinded (with tears, to say nothing of the rain and the gloom). As they retrace their steps - slowly now and alone - the women pray for the safety of their men. Note the clumsiness that the internal rhyme creates in the highly stilted third line of this stanza.
Stanza 6
One of the women despairingly voices her fear that the men will never return, but the narrator contradicts this fear and asserts that God or benevolent fate ( “some Hand” ) will guard the ways of the men and bring them home safely sooner or later. This assertion suggests a confidence that the narrator wishes to have but which may not really be so assured. The first and last stanzas of the poem make it clear that the narrator is anxious about the fate of the men. She asserts her hope that they will be safe, almost as if to invoke protection over them: she must realize that soldiers are, in fact, often killed or wounded in battle.
Stanza 7
The pathos of the women's position is shown skilfully in this stanza in the presentation of the contrasting hopes and fears of the wives. In the night, “when life beats are low” , the women are the prey of “voices” (their own imaginations or malicious spirits?) that “hint” at a less happy lot for their men folk. The narrator and her companions, however, try to be brave and to wait in trust (in “some Hand” protecting the men) to see what will happen in the end.
The poem only refers to war insomuch as it represents danger to the men and so, possible heartbreak to their wives. There is neither suggestion that war is wrong, nor patriotic celebration of battle: the cause for which the men are fighting is apparently immaterial. It is merely implied by the contrasting attitudes of the men and their wives that war is exciting to soldiers but distressing to their wives, who try to come to terms with this distress, realizing that marrying soldiers necessarily involves such risks as they now face.
Discussing the poem
· Does this poem show the women's point of view, the men's or both equally?
· What things in the poem make it seem very old? Which things are still relevant?
· Explain how this poem shows the effect of war on ordinary people.
· How convincing is the suggestion in the poem that some “Hand” will guard the men?
Drummer Hodge
This economical and very restrained poem contains no explicit (clearly stated) condemnation of war, but the implied criticism can hardly be missed. The language of the poem is for the most part simple and natural and conveys with clarity what befalls Hodge.
Drummers were usually the very youngest of soldiers, considered too young to fight. This drummer has a name that was once used as a kind of nickname or disrespectful term for people from the country (like “bumpkin” or “yokel” ). Hardy does not support this kind of prejudice, and intends no ridicule here.
The poem tells of a West Country boy, who has fallen in battle in South Africa, during the Boer War. The strangeness of the terrain, of the soil even, and of the constellations that nightly appear over Hodge's grave is repeatedly stressed. Hardy uses Afrikaans words to emphasize this strangeness. The poem is restrained but evokes great sympathy for Hodge. From clues that Hardy works skilfully into the verse account we can work out a great amount of information about what has happened.
Detailed commentary
Stanza 1
“They” are not identified but are evidently Hodge's fellow soldiers, members of a burial detail. The use of the monosyllabic pronoun is most economical. Hodge is thrown, not lowered with dignity and military honours, into his grave. He is not even placed in a coffin (there is no time, or inclination from his superiors, to find one) and he is buried “just as found” (a phrase better suited to an object than a person). It as if his body has not even been properly laid out, a suggestion confirmed by his being thrown into the ground. Hodge is given no headstone to mark the site of his burial, and the only landmark to show the position of his grave is the “kopje crest/That breaks the veldt around” . The foreignness, to Hodge, of his resting place is emphasised by the use of Afrikaans terms such as “kopje” and “veldt” , and by the strangeness, to him, of the stars that rise nightly over his grave. The reference to the stars recurs in the remaining stanzas of the poem, providing a kind of linking motif.
Stanza 2
The contrast between the simple English boy, “Young Hodge the Drummer”, fresh from his West Country home, and his remote and alien resting-place is further developed in the references to:
· the “Karoo” (another Afrikaans term),
· the scrub and barren soil, and,
· the foreign constellations which Hodge would have witnessed before his death, but too rarely for him to come to know them.
Stanza 3
Yet, despite his ignorance of his surroundings, Hodge will now be a part of the South African veldt forever. His remains will nourish the roots of “some Southern tree”. This stanza, too, ends with a reference to the alien constellations, which will “reign” forever over Hodge's grave.