ralph pite
pattern, following it and challenging it at the same time. Drummer Hodge is a
furtherinstance of the same subtle realignment; it would, in other words, be more
consoling to the bereaved and more encouraging to an empire-building point of
view if Hodge were transformed by war or if in his death he set a heroic example and
inspired his fellows. Yet none of this takes place; he just turns into ‘some Southern
tree’ after ‘They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest|Uncoffined—just as found’.^25
The poem hinges on the ‘Yet’ which begins the third stanza, a change of direction
that appears (quite conventionally) to offer consolation amidst loss. Hodge has
died an unheroic death and been buried quickly (stanza 1); worse still (stanza 2)
he had no understanding of what he was fighting for, ‘yet’ (stanza 3) the plain
harbours him, a tree grows out of him, and ‘strange-eyed constellations reign|His
stars eternally’. There seems something lasting here (‘for ever’ and ‘eternally’ both
occur in the final stanza), and something uplifting too, a hint that Hodge is coming
home in Africa because Africa accepts him, as Nature in its indifference takes up
everything, and because the strange stars, whose meaning he could never work out
while he was alive, now ‘reign|His stars’ after death. A familiar poetic structure
conforms to a familiar pattern of feeling, which is then redirected by the resistances
offered by the diction of the last stanza. Sympathy for the dead man does not
glorify either him or his role in the larger purpose of war; sympathy persists, like
the stars’ gaze, disdainful of whatever cause may have led to Hodge’s death. The
purposelessness of the death, similarly, does not disturb compassion; rather, the
poem suggests that you need to remain undistracted by questions of praise or
blame, profit or loss, if you are to mourn Hodge as he deserves.
This approach means that writer and reader are performing a ‘deed of home’ in
thinking about the war dead. When the souls of the slain are divided at the end of
the poem of that title, each sets off to its destination—the condemned to oblivion
in the ‘fathomless regions’ of the sea, the virtuous ‘homing...Like the Pentecost
Wind’. They leave behind, the speaker says, ‘in the gloaming|Sea-mutterings and
me’. The mutterings of the resentful souls, consigned to the depths, combine with
the noises audible as Hardy wakes from his dream-like experience: the noises of
the waves slapping and gurgling, ‘muttering’ in the hollows of the rocks around
Portland Bill. Lingering in the air too, however, is the muttering, the suppressed
grumbling of a poet unconvinced about the war, drawn to protest and withholding
or moderating that protest out of pity for those who have suffered directly. Many of
his Boer War poems were prompted, he said, by particular losses known to him, and
throughout the conflict he had Arthur Henniker and his wife Florence in his mind.
Hardy had been in love with Florence Henniker in the mid-1890s, and remained a
close friend; her husband was a professional soldier who had sailed away on one of
(^25) I am grateful to Roger Ebbatson for his discussion of Hardy’s use of ‘home’ in the Boer War
poems, in hisAn Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840–1920(Aldershot: Ashgate,
2005), 99–108.