‘graver things...braver things’ ‘smalling slowly to the gray sea-line’, as ‘each significant red smoke-shaft pales’
and,plangently, ‘Keen sense of severance everywhere prevails’. Just and only at that
moment, according to the poem, you can make out the questioning protest of the
soldiers. Likewise, ‘The Going of the Battery’ is the ‘Wives’ Lament’, ‘A Wife in
London’ hears of her husband’s death and the following day receives his last letter,
while the ‘Song of the Soldiers’ Wives and Sweethearts’ and ‘The Souls of the Slain’
both look forward (though with different feelings) to returns and reunions. The
poetry’s near-exclusive concern is with those left behind—with their anxieties and
vulnerabilities—and it makes no reference to the fighting itself or to the campaign’s
vicissitudes, although Hardy followed events closely. It is as if he wants his readers
to reconsider the vocabulary of war mongering itself by showing them how and
where the war will inevitably ‘strike home’.
‘Home’ is a word Hardy often uses in these poems. The soldiers’ wives hope
eagerly for their partners’ ‘nearing home again,|Dears, home again’;^21 the souls of
the slain, as they land on Portland Bill, ‘say ‘‘Home!’’ ’;^22 they are heading, they
say, ‘homeward and hearthward’ in hope of acclaim, and at the end of the poem
those ‘whose record was lovely and true...Bore to northward for home’; they
are allowed back into the paradise that is England, however, not because of their
feats in battle but because of ‘old homely acts’ of kindness to friends and family,
‘the long-ago commonplace facts|Of our lives—held by us as scarce part of our
story,|And rated as nought!’ Likewise, Drummer Hodge, in one of Hardy’s finest
Boer War poems, came to the war ‘Fresh from his Wessex home’, and in what
appears a foreshadowing of Rupert Brooke,the ‘portion of that unknown plain’
whereheisburied‘WillHodgeforeverbe’.^23 Brooke, though, has rewritten Hardy,
perhaps deliberately. In ‘Drummer Hodge’, some corner of this foreign field has
not been made ‘for ever England’ by Hodge’s death; the English soldier has instead
been taken up into the ‘unknown plain’; his grave will be watched in eternity by
the southern stars—the ‘foreign constellations’, that are renamed ‘strange-eyed
constellations’ at the poem’s end. His ‘homely Northern breast’ will ‘Grow to some
Southern tree’.^24
Homely, in the sense of unsophisticated, unadorned, or unpolished, is ‘Some-
times approbative, as connoting the absence of artificial embellishment; but often
apologetic, depreciative’ (OED). The returning souls of the slain depreciate their
‘Deeds of home’, valuing instead ‘glory and war-mightiness’, as war encourages
them to do. Similarly, Victorian culture repeats a version of theBildungsroman
in which foreign travel and imperial adventure turn the homely into the experi-
enced, the pale and gentle boy into the swarthy, toughened man. Dickens in
Great Expectationsand Hardy himself inAPairofBlueEyesemploy this narrative
(^21) Hardy, ‘Song of the Soldiers’ Wives and Sweethearts’, ibid. 97.
(^22) Hardy, ‘The Souls of the Slain’, ibid. 93. (^23) Hardy, ‘Drummer Hodge’, ibid. 91.
(^24) Hardy took up the same idea again in ‘Transformations’, and made it more encouraging; see
Complete Poems, 472.