‘graver things...braver things’ —Yet, voices haunting us, daunting us, taunting us,
Hintin the night-time when life beats are low
Other and graver things...Hold we to braver things,
Wait we, in trust, what Time’s fulness shall show.^37The taunts are grave, graver and more serious than hoping that ‘some Hand will
guard their ways’ (as the previous stanza imagines), but in response to that, after
the line’s hiatus, the women take courage. The lines carry traces ofIn Memoriam,
and they dissent from Tennyson’s trust in the larger hope. To wait ‘in trust’ in
Hardy’s poem seems to mean not panicking even while you recognize that you are
in the hands of something blind and undiscriminating. The most terrible ending
could be in store, but still you ‘trust’, you do not give way. The poems ends with
these lines, at the point when the women, after the pause in the penultimate line,
are resolving to go forward and, almost it seems, preparing for battle themselves.
That respect for the bravery of the non-combatant is typical of Hardy’s war poetry
and it mirrors—it is mirrored by—the fortitude of his own writing.
This story, though, has an unhappy ending. Two of Hardy’s most famous war
poems, ‘In Time of ‘‘The Breaking of Nations’’ ’ and ‘Men Who March Away’,
were written about the First World War, and, as in 1899, Hardy again supplied
patriotic poetry for the periodicals in 1914–15. Nonetheless, his best poetry during
the Great War and afterwards is restricted to pieces in which he despairs of himself
and of his work. ‘I Looked Up from My Writing’ finds the world so hideous that
it makes no sense to compose poetry about it any longer. ‘Quid Hic Agis?’ accuses
the poet himself of being a coward and a failure because the horrors of the war
have silenced him. That accusation does contain an element of challenge (addressed
to the reader, the conscientious objector, or the reluctant conscript), and Hardy
composed further responsibly heartening poems forMoments of Vision.Hewrote,
for instance, of an old psalm tune heard again, ‘Here in these turmoiled years of
belligerent fire|Living still on—and onward, maybe,|Till Doom’s great day be!’,^38
and about Shakespeare, whose writings have lasted and will last ‘In harmonies
that cow Oblivion,|And, like the wind, with all-uncared effect|Maintain a sway’.^39
These, though, are strained attempts to discover and provide solace amidst misery;
they lack the conviction of, say, ‘To the Moon’ and ‘A Backward Spring’, both of
which acknowledge despair, and they are attempts to suppress the self-disdain that
surfaces elsewhere, in ‘The Pedigree’ or ‘Old Furniture’.
The butchery of the Western Front was, to Hardy, literally unendurable, and
not being able to bear it made him feel ashamed. Not only did the First World
War disappoint his faint hope that humanity might slowly be advancing, and
that ultimately consciousness would inform the will, and not only was there no
(^37) Hardy, ‘The Going of the Battery’, ibid. 89.
(^38) Hardy, ‘Apostrophe to an Old Psalm Tune’, ibid. 432.
(^39) Hardy, ‘To Shakespeare’, ibid. 439–40.