Poetry and the pity of war

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.

I quote this poem in full for its pathos. Hardy, more than most, wrote of the harsh malignancy of fate and in this poem he captured the helplessness and hopelessness of those caught up in war - especially a boy. In particular and foreshadowing the poetry of World War I, he worked on the theme that those who die on the battlefields of the worlds remember, with due poignancy, the homes from which they come and the countryside they have left behind, combined with a knowledge that, in death, they will become part of the very soil they love. Furthermore, in this poem we see the tragic anonymity of a boy (surname only) thrown into some quickly dug pit for dead bodies.

It seems to me that Thomas Hardy, master of melancholy, in all his poetry abandoned the cosy heroism of Waterloo, Balaclava, and the Empire for the realism of the fighting man and his underlying hatred of war.

Hardy's major war-poem, The Dynasts, published between 1904 and 1908, dealt with Napoleon, his threat to Britain and his strutting walk across the stage of history. Throughout, Hardy related these great events, as he did in Drummer Hodge, to his rustic Wessex friends and over all he saw the Immanent Will, as he called it, the Spirit of the Pities and the Spirit of the Years. These were, in another sense, to quote W. B. Yeats, the 'great black oxen' which, as he saw it, God the herdsman was goading on behind. Hardy was, in simple terms, a gloomy fatalist and the sense of this comes through in one of his most anthologised poems written soon after the outbreak of the First World War: In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'.

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 onward the same Though Dynasties pass.

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

Hardy took his title from the Old Testament (Jeremiah Chapter 51, Verse 20) - 'I will break in pieces the nations.'

During the quiet Edwardian evening before the First World War (Edward VII died in 1910), Britain held sway over half the globe, class divisions were as marked as ever but a European conflict seemed to the average man a remote possibility. He heard the warning of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) against national pride but took little notice when the old Queen was almost deified in Jubilee and Kipling wrote his Recessional.

God of our fathers, known of old Lord of our far-flung battle-line, Beneath whose awful Hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget - lest we forget!

There was no stauncher patriot than Kipling but he could see, more clearly than most, the danger of being drunk with power and, although he was much misunderstood, being labelled an Imperialist or a Jingoist, he exercised some restraint on the pre-war world. However, the spirit of the times was one of optimism and ease, heroism and patriotism, exemplified in The Dying Patriot by James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915) who died, not as a result of the war but of tuberculosis in a Swiss sanatorium.