Victorian Poetry

TRICIA LOOTENS

Heroica: A Book of Verse for Boys (1891) - which opens with a notorious
warmongering passage from Maud - was reprinted as late as 1927; it may
stand for a whole series of such works, whose underlying anxieties about
what Anita Hemphill McCormick terms "manliness in decline" may have
helped shape many twentieth-century readers' first, disturbing, exposure to
poetry. 54

VII

As the century's end brought forth a surge of vehement, often abstract,
imperial patriotic poetry, it also gave rise to what Thomas Hardy termed
"works that breathe a more quiet and philosophic spirit." 55 Of these,
Hardy's own sequence of "War Poems" (1899-1901) counts among the
best known. In a career whose writing on issues of war and nation
stretches from early Wessex Poems on the Napoleonic Wars (such as
"Valenciennes" and "Leipzig" [both 1898]) through the Napoleonic epic
The Dynasts (1904-08), to the post-First World War weariness of
"Christmas: 1924," "War Poems" comprise what Kathryn R. King and
William W Morgan have called Hardy's "first significant public poems." 56
Both through their deliberately - even aggressively - modest tone and
their evocation of speakers' relationships to tangible, sensuously experi-
enced national landscapes, his "War Poems" counter the bombast of
"Greater England" jingoism.

"How long, O striving Teutons, Slavs, and Gaels, / Must your wroth
reasoning trade on lives like these, / That are as puppets in a playing
hand?" (TH 8-10). When shall "patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
/ Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?" (13-14). These questions,
whose "seeming words" (7) are beaten out by the "late long tramp of
mounting men" (6) in "Departure," echo through Hardy's poetic sequence.
Still "Bondslave to realms" (14), the state patriotism of "War Poems"
inspires military sacrifices that bear only the most ironic or equivocal
relations to glory.

Located, through a parenthetical dateline, on the "Southampton Docks:
October 1899," the sonnet "Embarcation" opens the roughly chronological
sequence by rehearsing - and reversing - conventional patriotic glorifica-
tion of Britain's military past:

Here, where Vespasian's legions struck the sands,

And Cerdic with his Saxons entered in,

And Henry's army leapt afloat to win

Convincing triumphs over neighbour lands,

274