Song of the Soldiers

Song of the Soldiers

What of the faith and fire within us
Men who march away
Ere the barn-cocks say
Night is growing gray,
To hazards whence no tears can win us;
What of the faith and fire within us
Men who march away!

Is it a purblind prank, O think you,
Friend with the musing eye
Who watch us stepping by,
With doubt and dolorous sigh?
Can much pondering so hoodwink you?
Is it a purblind prank, O think you,
Friend with the musing eye?

Nay. We see well what we are doing,
Though some may not see --
Dalliers as they be --
England's need are we;
Her distress would leave us rueing:
Nay. We well see what we are doing,
Though some may not see!

In our heart of hearts believing
Victory crowns the just,
And that braggarts must
Surely bite the dust,
Press we to the field ungrieving,
In our heart of hearts believing
Victory crowns the just.

Hence the faith and fire within us
Men who march away
Ere the barn-cocks say
Night is growing gray,
To hazards whence no tears can win us;
Hence the faith and fire within us
Men who march away.

In Time Of

In Time Of

Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onwards the same
Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight
Go whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

Afterwards

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
'He was a man who used to notice such things'?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
'To him this must have been a familiar sight.'

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, 'He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.'

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
'He was one who had an eye for such mysteries'?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
'He hears it not now, but used to notice such things'?

The Dead man Walking
They hail me as one living,
But don't they know
That I have died of late years,
Untombed although?

I am but a shape that stands here,
A pulseless mould,
A pale past picture, screening
Ashes gone cold.

Not at a minute's warning,
Not in a loud hour,
For me ceased Time's enchantments
In hall and bower.

There was no tragic transit,
No catch of breath,
When silent seasons inched me
On to this death ...

-- A Troubadour-youth I rambled
With Life for lyre,
The beats of being raging
In me like fire.

But when I practised eyeing
The goal of men,
It iced me, and I perished
A little then.

When passed my friend, my kinsfolk,
Through the Last Door,
And left me standing bleakly,
I died yet more;

And when my Love's heart kindled
In hate of me,
Wherefore I knew not, died I
One more degree.

And if when I died fully
I cannot say,
And changed into the corpse-thing
I am to-day,

Yet is it that, though whiling
The time somehow
In walking, talking, smiling,
I live not now.

The Ghost of the Past
We two kept house, the Past and I,
The Past and I;
I tended while it hovered nigh,
Leaving me never alone.
It was a spectral housekeeping
Where fell no jarring tone,
As strange, as still a housekeeping

As ever has been known.

As daily I went up the stair,
And down the stair,
I did not mind the Bygone there --
The Present once to me;
Its moving meek companionship
I wished might ever be,
There was in that companionship
Something of ecstasy.

It dwelt with me just as it was,
Just as it was
When first its prospects gave me pause
In wayward wanderings,
Before the years had torn old troths
As they tear all sweet things,
Before gaunt griefs had torn old troths
And dulled old rapturings.

And then its form began to fade,
Began to fade,
Its gentle echoes faintlier played
At eves upon my ear
Than when the autumn's look embrowned
The lonely chambers here,
The autumn's settling shades embrowned
Nooks that it haunted near.

And so with time my vision less,
Yea, less and less
Makes of that Past my housemistress,
It dwindles in my eye;
It looms a far-off skeleton
And not a comrade nigh,
A fitful far-off skeleton
Dimming as days draw by.

The Last Chrysanthemum

Why should this flower delay so long
To show its tremulous plumes?
Now is the time of plaintive robin-song,
When flowers are in their tombs.

Through the slow summer, when the sun
Called to each frond and whorl
That all he could for flowers was being done,
Why did it not uncurl?

It must have felt that fervid call
Although it took no heed,
Waking but now, when leaves like corpses fall,
And saps all retrocede.

Too late its beauty, lonely thing,
The season's shine is spent,
Nothing remains for it but shivering
In tempests turbulent.

Had it a reason for delay,
Dreaming in witlessness
That for a bloom so delicately gay
Winter would stay its stress?

- I talk as if the thing were born
With sense to work its mind;
Yet it is but one mask of many worn
By the Great Face behind.

The Rambler

I do not see the hills around,
Nor mark the tints the copses wear;
I do not note the grassy ground
And constellated daisies there.

I hear not the contralto note
Of cuckoos hid on either hand,
The whirr that shakes the nighthawk's throat
When eve's brown awning hoods the land.

Some say each songster, tree and mead--
All eloquent of love divine--
Receives their constant careful heed:
Such keen appraisement is not mine.

The tones around me that I hear,
The aspects, meanings, shapes I see,
Are those far back ones missed when near,
And now perceived too late by me

The Slow Nature

THY husband--poor, poor Heart!--is dead--
Dead, out by Moreford Rise;
A bull escaped the barton-shed,
Gored him, and there he lies!"

--"Ha, ha--go away! 'Tis a tale, methink,
Thou joker Kit!" laughed she.
"I've known thee many a year, Kit Twink,
And ever hast thou fooled me!"

--"But, Mistress Damon--I can swear
Thy goodman John is dead!
And soon th'lt hear their feet who bear
His body to his bed."

So unwontedly sad was the merry man's face--
That face which had long deceived--
That she gazed and gazed; and then could trace
The truth there; and she believed.

She laid a hand on the dresser-ledge,
And scanned far Egdon-side;
And stood; and you heard the wind-swept sedge
And the rippling Froom; till she cried:

"O my chamber's untidied, unmade my bed,
Though the day has begun to wear!
'What a slovenly hussif!' it will be said,
When they all go up my stair!"

She disappeared; and the joker stood
Depressed by his neighbor's doom,
And amazed that a wife struck to widowhood
Thought first of her unkempt room.

But a fortnight thence she could take no food,
And she pined in a slow decay;
While Kit soon lost his mournful mood
And laughed in his ancient way.

The Ivy Wife

The Ivy Wife.
I longed to love a full-boughed beech
And be as high as he:
I stretched an arm within his reach,
And signalled unity.
But with his drip he forced a breach,
And tried to poison me.
I gave the grasp of partnership
To one of other race--A plane:
he barked him strip by strip
From upper bough to base;
And me therewith;
for gone my grip,
My arms could not enlace.
In new affection next I strove
To coll an ash I saw,
And he in trust received my love;
Till with my soft green claw
I cramped and bound him as I wove...
Such was my love:
ha-ha!By this I gained his strength and height
Without his rivalry.
But in my triumph I lost sightOf afterhaps.
Soon he,
Being bark-bound,
flagged, snapped,
fell outright,
And in his fall felled me!

Then and now

Then and Now
When battles were fought
With a chivalrous sense of should and ought,
In spirit men said,
"End we quick or dead,
Honour is some reward!
Let us fight fair -- for our own best or worst;
So, Gentlemen of the Guard,Fire first!
"In the open they stood,
Man to man in his knightlihood:
They would not deign
To profit by a stain
On the honourable rules,
Knowing that practise perfidy no man durst
Who in the heroic schools
Was nurst.
But now, behold, what
Is war with those where honour is not!
Rama laments
Its dead innocents;
Herod howls: "Sly slaughterRules now!
Let us, by modes once called accurst,
Overhead, under water,Stab first."
To A Lady
NOW that my page upcloses,
doomed, maybe,
Never to press thy cosy cushions more,
Or wake thy ready Yeas as heretofore,
Or stir thy gentle vows of faith in me:
Knowing thy natural receptivity,
I figure that, as flambeaux banish eve,
My sombre image,
warped by insidious heave
Of those less forthright,
must lose place in thee.
So be it. I have borne such.
Let thy dreams
Of me and mine diminish day by day,
And yield their space to shine of smugger things;
Till I shape to thee but in fitful gleams,
And then in far and feeble visitings,
And then surcease.
Truth will be truth alway.
To Flowers from Italy Sunned in the South,
and here to-day;
--If all organic thingsBe sentient,
Flowers, as some men say,
What are your ponderings?
How can you stay,
nor vanish quite
From this bleak spot of thorn,
And birch, and fir, and frozen white
Expanse of the forlorn?
Frail luckless exiles hither brought!
Your dust will not regain
Old sunny haunts of Classic thought
When you shall waste and wane;
But mix with alien earth,
be litWith frigid Boreal flame,
And not a sign remain in it
To tell men whence you came.
Zermatt Thirty-two years since,
up against the sun,
Seven shapes,
thin atomies to lower sight,
Labouringly leapt and gained thy gabled height,
And four lives paid for what the seven had won.
They were the first by whom the deed was done,
And when I look at thee,
my mind takes flight
To that day's tragic feat of manly might,
As though, till then, of history thou hadst none.
Yet ages ere men topped thee,
late and soon
Thou watch'dst each night the planets lift and lower;
Thou gleam'dst to Joshua's pausing sun and moon,
And brav'dst the tokening sky when Caesar's power
Approached its bloody end:
yea, saw'st that Noon
When darkness filled the earth till the ninth hour.

Some interesting words on Hardy.

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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”
This is a simple and unpretentious piece marked by a rather uncharacteristic optimism that is in clear contrast to the resigned, almost fatalistic, character of Channel Firing. Hardy presents the reader with a series of three impressionistic glimpses or cameos of everyday, rural life and suggests that these will persist, unchanged, while kingdoms rise and fall, and long after the details of the various wars have been forgotten.
First Hardy shows us an old horse being led along, slowly, as it breaks up the clods of earth with a harrow. Both the animal and the man leading it walk half asleep. The slowness of the harrowing and the silence of the scene create a sense of peacefulness.
Next Hardy describes the equally slow and peaceful burning of the weeds, which, he asserts, will continue despite the passing of “Dynasties”.
Finally, he depicts as girl and her lover, also silent as they whisper, and assures us that their story will outlast the stories of war.
Hardy shows these three simple and everyday details of the scene to represent:
work (seen as work of an agricultural nature, for it is this which sustains life) and
love (which also sustains the life of the human race).
These things, the poet claims, will survive, in spite of “Dynasties” and “wars”.
This is an unusually optimistic poem, but the optimism is asserted rather than reasoned: perhaps Hardy implies that the things he describes are so fundamental and natural to human existence that they must survive, whereas kingdoms and wars are not essential to man's life - a very different conclusion from that drawn in Channel Firing.

The Milk Maid

The Milk Maid
Under a daisied bank
There stands a rich red ruminating cow,
And hard against her flank
A cotton-hooded milkmaid bends her brow.
The flowery river-ooze
Upheaves and falls;
the milk purrs in the pail;
Few pilgrims but would choose
The peace of such a life in such a vale.
The maid breathes words--to vent,
It seems, her sense of Nature's scenery,
Of whose life, sentiment,
And essence,
very part itself is she.
She bends a glance of pain,
And, at a moment,
lets escape a tear;
Is it that passing train,
Whose alien whirr offends her country ear?
-Nay! Phyllis does not dwell
On visual and familiar things like these;
What moves her is the spell
Of inner themes and inner poetries:
Could but by Sunday morn
Her gay new gown come,
meads might dry to dun,
Trains shriek till ears were torn,
If Fred would not prefer that Other One.