Hardy and Two First World War Poets

JoAnna Stephens Mink

The vision of the poets who emerged during the First World War--the Great War--has dominated the popular image of war. It 'represents one of those primal moments when poetic form bears most fully the weight of trauma' (Das). The name of Rupert Brooke, best known as a War Poet, is included on the Poets of the First World War memorial in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, along with Siegfried Sassoon's. Thomas Hardy's cremains are interred nearby. Although Sassoon was the only one to serve at The Front, these three men share poetic, as well as spatial, connections.

In 1908 Brooke met Hardy in Cambridge at an undergraduate performance of Milton's Comus. Brooke describes the encounter: 'It was all rather an exciting time and I met Thomas Hardy at breakfast. He was quite incredibly shrivelled and ordinary, and said faintly pessimistic things in a flat voice about the toast' (qtd. in Ray 136). More complimentary, he wrote in 1910 that Hardy's Time's Laughingstocks (1909) was 'very good . . . His command of metre is so astounding' (qtd. in Gibson 82). In November 1914, Brooke began composing probably his most famous poem, 'The Soldier', while stationed at Blandford Camp, the fair copy of which was written on Hood Battalion notepaper and published February 1915. Blandford is twenty miles from Dorchester, a brief journey on the A354 from Hardy's home.

'The Soldier'

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

At the beginning of the war, 'The Soldier' struck a chord made poignant by Brooke's early death at age 27 from blood poisoning on the way to the Dardanelles in April 1915. 'The Soldier' sharply contrasts with Hardy's 'Drummer Hodge,' first published as 'The Dead Drummer' in November 1899. In 1902 Hardy published Poems of the Past and the Present, a collection which includes 'Drummer Hodge' and other poems depicting his distress about the horrors of the Second Boer War, horrors repeated on a much larger scale less than two decades later.

'Drummer Hodge'

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
     Uncoffined—just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
     That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
     Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew—
     Fresh from his Wessex home—
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
     The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
     Strange stars amid the gloam.

III

Yet portion of that unknown plain
     Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
     Grow up a Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
     His stars eternally.

Hardy's drummer boy is hastily thrown in 'to rest / Uncoffined - just as found' to become 'portion of that unknown plain'--unmarked, unknown, forgotten. Orindrila Ghosh opines that 'a fanciful version of this idea informs' Brooke's poem. As Ghosh and others have pointed out, Brooke's soldier, on the other hand, asserts that upon his death, there will be 'some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England' (132). Brooke's soldier ruminates on the possibility of dying in battle, whereas Drummer Hodge is already dead, however that occurred. Interestingly, both figures are unnamed, though Hodge is based on a Dorchester boy who was simply thrown in, his death unnoticed except by 'foreign constellations'.

Of all the poets who eventually visited Max Gate, 'none created deeper impressions than Siegfried Sassoon. They exchanged letters for a time but did not meet until 6 November 1918, when Sassoon immediately became Hardy's "adored young friend"' (Millgate 484). Sassoon had long been an admirer of Hardy's poetry and prose. At The Front in 1916, he read Tess of the D'Urbervilles. In 1917 he dedicated The Old Huntsman and Other Poems to Hardy, and Hardy's acknowledgement resulted in Sassoon's visit in November 1918. On the journey, Sassoon 'speculated as to how far the Mr Hardy of Max Gate would harmonize with the writer whose works I had absorbed so fruitfully' (qtd. in Gibson 126). At least ten more visits followed. Sassoon's impression of Hardy in his old age markedly differs from Brooke's. In September 1925 Sassoon recorded that the sprightly Hardy 'once again amazed me by his vigour of mind and body' (qtd. in Meyers).

Although initially enthusiastic, after seeing action in France, Sassoon captured in his poems the feeling of trench warfare and the weariness of British soldiers for a war that seemed never to end. Published in March 1919, 'Aftermath' conveys the anger, the anguish and the sorrow that underscored Armistice observances.

'Aftermath'

Have you forgotten yet?...
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked a while at the crossing of city ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.

But the past is just the same—and War's a bloody game...
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz—
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench—
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack—
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads—those ashen-gray
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the slain of the war that you'll never forget!

Sassoon's poem could be in response to Hardy's, published in a special Armistice Day section of The Times.

'And There Was a Great Calm'

(On the Signing of the Armistice, 11 Nov. 1918)

There had been years of Passion—scorching, cold,

And much Despair, and Anger heaving high,

Care whitely watching, Sorrows manifold,

Among the young, among the weak and old,

And the pensive Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency;

There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;

Some could, some could not, shake off misery:

The Sinister Spirit sneered: 'It had to be!'

And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, 'Why?'

One decade after the start of the First World War, in only four lines Hardy condenses and intensifies his despair from the deaths and atrocities of the war that changed the world.

'Christmas: 1924'

'Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it,

And pay a million priests to bring it.

After two thousand years of mass

We've got as far as poison-gas.'

WORKS CITED

Das, Santanu, 'Reframing First World War poetry.' www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/reframing-first- world-war-poetry.

Ghosh, Oindrila. '"Quaint and Curious War Is": Hardy and the Poets of the First World War.' The Thomas Hardy Journal, Autumn 2015, pp. 130-39.

Gibson, James, editor. Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections. Macmillan, 1999.

Meyers, Jeffrey. 'Hardy and the Warriors.' New Criterion, September 2002, pp. 34-40.

Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited. Oxford UP, 2006.

Ray, Martin. Thomas Hardy Remembered. Routledge, 2007.

Sassoon, Siegfried. Memories of an Infantry Officer. 1930. Project Gutenberg ebook, 2012.

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