TRICIA LOOTENStion. It only remained for First World War poets such as Siegfried Sassoon
or Wilfred Owen to strike the death blows.
Though many aspects of Victorian patriotic poetry fell (and were
pushed) into discredit during and after the First World War, as Hardy's later
poems bitterly attest, the glorification of war did not. The final poem of
Hardy's sequence, "The Sick Battle-God" has thus been understandably
criticized for its optimistic assertion that the "Battle-god is god no more"
(TH 44). Hardy's poetry stands, nonetheless, as an impressive patriotic
refusal to invoke that god's "fearsome aid" through "rune and rhyme" (8).
Late in the sequence, as the lone meditative speaker of "The Souls of the
Slain" watches over the Bill of Portland, the moth-like spirits of soldiers
arrive in direct flight from South Africa, hoping to "feast" on their "fame"
(36). Met by a "senior soul-flame" (32), they learn that their "kin linger
less" (39) on their "glory and war-mightiness" (40) than on their "Deeds of
home" (63). Those souls "whose record was lovely and true" (82) rejoice a
"thousand times more" (78) in "hearts" that have kept them "green for old
kindness" (JJ) than in military glory; they speed home. The others, who
had counted on heroism in battle to outshine domestic "bitter traditions"
(83), fly seaward - and plunge "to the fathomless regions / Of myriads
forgot" (89-90).
In "The Souls of the Slain," the line between "lovely" and "bitter" bonds
to one's homeland emerges clearly. Within Victorian patriotic poetry as a
whole, however, expressions of love for the imagined community of Britain
or "Greater Britain" cannot help but resonate with cries for oppressive
"unity" or praise of brutal militarism, any more than they can avoid
echoing laments of national - and personal - loss, division, or exile.
Chesterton's and Woolf's generation may thus have been both right and
wrong in its attempts to discredit such writing. At present, Victorian
patriotic fervor in its diverse forms deserves closer scrutiny, not least
because - even in its most reactionary moments - it strives so openly to
unite developing conceptions of subjective identity, at its most intimate,
private, and inescapable, with shifting definitions of the powers and duties
of public political subjects. Crucial in nineteenth-century terms, that
project still speaks to the readers of nations whose own "bitter" and
"lovely" imagined communities remain under dispute.
NOTESThanks to Sandy Hughes for her assistance in locating sources for this chapter.
1 Hugh Walker, The Greater Victorian Poets (London: Swan Sonnenschein,
1895), 134-
2 Hugh Walker, The Literature of the Victorian Era (Cambridge: Cambridge
276