7-1-09
Today Brian picked me up at 11:00. Luckily not on the “motorbike” as it is in for servicing but he has said that some days we will travel that way. I’m not so sure about that! Anyway…

We went to the study center and mapped out tomorrows trip in and around Dorchester. Dorchester is Hardy's birthplace and the setting in The Mayor of Casterbridge County (one of my favorite hardy novels). We will also be visiting sights central to Far From the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I got a thorough refresher of those novels as well as some discussion of recurring themes in Hardy's writings including his poems. Hardy's novels betray an obvious nostalgia for the history, culture, and local folklore of the people and places where he grew up but many of his novels were quite controversial in his day. As his life progressed he became more and more disillusioned with God, religion, and various related social customs. These themes can be seen over and over again in his writings.

I am including the two poems that I have liked the best of the ones I have been introduced to thus far. Although not political, Hardy thought war a tragic and ridiculous undertaking as evidenced in these poems.

Drummer Hodge
They throw drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined—just as found;
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the velt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew—
Fresh from his Wessex home—
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The bush, the duty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.

Channel Firing
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe1 cow drooled. Till God called, “No;
It’s gunnery practise out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

“And all nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

“That this is not the judgement-hour
For some of them’s a blessed thing,
For if it were they’d have to scour
Hell’s floor for so much threatening. . . .

“Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).”

So down we lay again. “I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,”
Said one, ‘than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!”

And many a skeleton shook his head.
“Instead of preaching forty year,”
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
“I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge2.