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.

The Man he Killed

The Man he Killed
Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
I shot him dead because--
Because he was my foe,
Just so:
my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough;
although
He thought he'd 'list,
perhaps,
Off-hand like
--just as I
--Was out of work
--had sold his traps
--No other reason why.
Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat,
if met where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.

The Ghost of the Past.

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 Levelled Churchyard.
"O passenger,
pray list and catch
Our sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wrenched memorial stones!
"We late-lamented, resting here,
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,
'I know not which I am!
'"The wicked people have annexed
The verses on the good;
A roaring drunkard sports the text
Teetotal Tommy should!
"Where we are huddled none can trace,
And if our names remain,
They pave some path or p-ing place
Where we have never lain!
"There's not a modest maiden elf
But dreads the final Trumpet,
Lest half of her should rise herself,
And half some local strumpet!
"From restorations of Thy fane,
From smoothings of Thy sward,
From zealous Churchmen's pick and plane
Deliver us O Lord! Amen!"

Poems of Thomas Hardy

On a Fine Morning.

Whence comes Solace?
--Not from seeing
What is doing,
suffering, being,
Not from noting Life's conditions,
Nor from heeding Time's monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing at the gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.
IIThus do I this heyday, holding
Shadows but as lights unfolding,
As no specious show this moment
With its irised embowment;
But as nothing other than
Part of a benignant plan;
Proof that earth was made for man.
……………………………………………………….
She hears the Storm

There was a time in former years
--While my roof-tree was his
--When I should have been distressed by fears
At such a night as this!
I should have murmured anxiously,
'The prickling rain strikes cold;
His road is bare of hedge or tree,
And he is getting old.'
But now the fitful chimney-roar,
The drone of Thorncombe trees,
The Froom in flood upon the moor,
The mud of Mellstock Leaze,
The candle slanting sooty-wick'd,
The thuds upon the thatch,
The eaves drops on the window flicked,
The clanking garden-hatch,
And what they mean to wayfarers,
I scarcely heed or mind;
He has won that storm-tight roof of hers
Which Earth grants all her kind.
……………………………………………….
Shelley's Lark.
Somewhere afield here something lies
In Earth's oblivious eyeless trust
That moved a poet to prophecies
-A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust
The dust of the lark that Shelley heard,
And made immortal through times to be;
-Though it only lived like another bird,
And knew not its immortality.
Lived its meek life;
then, one day,
fell -A little ball of feather and bone;
And how it perished,
when piped farewell,
And where it wastes,
are alike unknown.
Maybe it rests in the loam I view,
Maybe it throbs in a myrtle's green,
Maybe it sleeps in the coming hue
Of a grape on the slopes of yon inland scene.
Go find it, faeries, go and find
That tiny pinch of priceless dust,
And bring a casket silver-lined,
And framed of gold that gems encrust;
And we will lay it safe therein,
And consecrate it to endless time;
For it inspired a bard to win
Ecstatic heights in thought and rhyme.
……………………………………………………
The Bullfinches
Bother Bulleys,
let us sing
From the dawn till evening!
-For we know not that we go not
When the day's pale pinions fold
Unto those who sang of old.
When I flew to Blackmoor Vale,
Whence the green-gowned faeries hail,
Roosting near them I could hear them
Speak of queenly Nature's ways,
Means, and moods,
--well known to fays.
All we creatures, nigh and far(Said they there),
the Mother's are:
Yet she never shows endeavour
To protect from warrings wild
Bird or beast she calls her child.
Busy in her handsome house
Known as Space,
she falls a-drowse;
Yet, in seeming, works on dreaming,
While beneath her groping hands
Fiends make havoc in her bands.
How her hussif'ry succeeds
She unknows or she unheeds,
All things making for Death's taking!
--So the green-gowned faeries say
Living over Blackmoor way.
Come then, brethren, let us sing,
From the dawn till evening!
-For we know not that we go not
When the day's pale pinions fold
Unto those who sang of old.………………………………………..

The darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate,
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to me
The Century's corpse outleant,
Its crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind its death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervorless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead,
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited.An aged thrush, frail,
gaunt and small,
With blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night airSome blessed Hope,
whereof he knew,
And I was unaware.

Thomas Hardy-the Man