NOVEMBER THE MONTH OF REMEMBRANCE

NOVEMBER THE MONTH OF REMEMBRANCE

Thomas Hardy was a Victorian novelist but a modern poet- at least a poet of the transition to modern times. He wrote novels first, because the sold and his poetry didn’t, but in the late 1890s his gloomy Tess and Jude were unfavourably received, and Hardy, buy now financially secure, devoted the last thirty years of his life to poetry. The same sense of tragic irony that informs his best novels is applied in many of his poems to events of the twentieth century- like the sinking of the Titanic, in the Convergence of the Twain, or the approach of World War I, in Channel Firing. He could also, however, sing a moving requiem for Drummer Hodge, a casualty of the Boer War, and it was the old pessimist, Hardy, who, in the dark time of World War I, reminded us of the verities that will outlast wars and dynasties. Hardy’s fame as a novelist has dimmed a good deal, but his reputation as a poet is growing; like Housman he must be regarded as one of the major English poets of the early twentieth century.

The first time it was fathers,
The last time it was sons.
And in between our husbands
Marched away with drums and guns.
November being the month of remembrance, I want to dedicate this poem from Thomas Hardy’s work to all those brave men and women who have fought for us and laid down their lives and for those who are still fighting for us.

DRUMMER HODGE
- Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928)
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.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellation reign
His stars eternally.

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