matthew bevis
audience...thanin any previous war’.^99 This is undoubtedly true, but two of the
most distinguished war poets of the late Victorian period (Thomas Hardy and
A. E. Housman) were intent on forging a tone that expressed something other than
voluble insistence. When Hardy complained that bellicose war poetry tended to
‘throw into the shade works that breathe a more quiet and philosophic spirit’,^100
he was not defending anything as simplistic as ‘anti-war poetry’. Rather, he was
defending the need for another kind of accent in poetry about war. When poems
against war themselves take on a warring tone (Colby’s lines above are an example
of this; his poetic questions are merely rhetorical), they might be said to become
part of the problem they anatomize. Hardy and Housman were more circumspect
about the seductive pull of fighting talk, and were aware of the ease with which
it could generate an oppositional voice that was implicated in the stridency it
condemned.
Hardy’s war poetry takes another kind of breath; in his poems one feels
that marching rhythms might at any time be given their marching orders. In
‘Embarcation’, the first in his series of ‘War Poems’ to be included inPoems of the
Past and Present(1901), we learn that ‘deckward tramp the bands’.^101 ‘Tramp’, not
‘march’—even the soldiers seem unable to pick up their feet, and Hardy’s metrical
feet frequently display a similar recalcitrance. An article in theQuarterly Review
in 1900 noted that patriotic poetry had been changing its tune. From Tennyson
onwards, Victorian poetry ‘has, perhaps, here and there a somewhat uncertain
sound, as though feeling its way...the patriotic fervour of our forefathers, is
exchanged for a limping jolt’.^102 This uncertain sound resonates throughout
Hardy’s work. Rather than absorbing themselvesinbattle, his war poems tend to
dwell on scenes of anticipation or aftermath, either gathering a kind of reluctant
breath for what is to come or stuttering over a past that refuses to go away. Take
the close of ‘The Man He Killed’ (1902), where a soldier dwells on the whys and
wherefores of battle:
‘I shot him dead because—
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That’s clear enough; although‘He thought he’d ’list, perhaps,
Off-hand like—just as I—(^99) Van Wyk Smith,Drummer Hodge, 122.
(^100) Thomas Hardy, quoted in Kathryn R. King and William W. Morgan, ‘Hardy and The Boer War:
The Public Poet in Spite of Himself’, 101 Victorian Poetry, 17 (1979), 66–84.
102 Hardy, ‘Embarcation’, inTheCompletePoems, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), 86.
‘English Patriotic Poetry’,Quarterly Review, 192 (1900), 526 and 536. For another contemporary
review which noticed a change in tune, see J. A. R. Marriott, ‘The Imperial Note in Victorian Poetry’,
Nineteenth Century, 48 (1900), 236–48.