Critical Comparison of ‘Drummer Hodge’ by Thomas Hardy & ‘Channel Firing’ by Thomas Hardy
...t” , and by the strangeness, to him, of the stars that rise nightly over his grave. The reference to the stars recurs in the remaining stanzas of the poem, providing a kind of linking motif. The contrast between the simple English boy, “Young Hodge the Drummer”, fresh from his West Country home, and his remote and alien resting-place is further developed in the references to the “Karoo” (another Afrikaans term), the scrub and barren soil, and the foreign constellations which Hodge would have witnessed before his death, but too rarely for him to come to know them. Yet, despite his ignorance of his surroundings, Hodge will now be a part of the South African “veldt” forever. His remains will nourish the roots of “some Southern tree”. The pathos of Hodge's fate is made more striking by the restrained manner in which Hardy relates his burial. The young man's innocence and youth make his premature death seem all the more wasteful, but also highlights the fact that his spirit is eternal: his body will nourish a “southern tree” and become part of the “foreign” soil. This gives a sense of meaning in his death and contentment with where he is, so while humans are mortal, the stars are linked with eternity. While the first two verses express the moving loss of Drummer Hodge and reveals him as being small and worthless while verse three is more deep thinking and philosophical, it talks about life after death and makes Hodge into part of something vast, the universe with stars and constellations. Hardy doesn’t want to end the poem in a negative way, he wants an optimistic ending so he talks about Hodge’s stars being “eternally”. “Channel Firing” in contrast to ‘Drummer Hodge’ is a more humorous treatment of war, but which is equally savagely critical in its scornful condemnation of man's adamant desire for conflict. It isn’t as economical in language, but looks more satirically at the notion of war, so despite being more comical than Drummer Hodge, still instills in the reader the same sense of despair that is also associated with ‘Drummer Hodge’. The poem is spoken in the first person - unlike drummer Hodge, which is spoken in the third person which highlights the seperation of Hodge with the rest of the world - by one of the dead buried in a church, in which the windows have been shattered by the report of guns being fired for “practice” in the English Channel. So great is the disturbance that the skeletons believe Judgement Day has come. In a gruesomely comical picture, they are represented as suddenly sitting up in readiness for the great day. The humour takes an irreverent turn as Hardy introduces God to the proceedings, reassuring the corpses that it is not time for the Judgement Day but merely “gunnery practice”, adding that the world is as it was when the dead men “went below” to their graves. That is to say, every country is trying to make its methods of destruction more efficient, and shed more blood, making “red war yet redder”. God sees the living as insane and no more ready to exercise Christian love than are the dead, who are obviously now “helpless in such matters”. In other words, the living, too, do nothing “for Christes sake”. God continues, observing that those responsible for the “gunnery practice” are fortunate that it is not the day of judgement as if it were, their warlike threats would be punished by their having to “scour the floor of Hell”. While the suggested punishment is somewhat ridiculous, and also comic, it is almost a fitting one. Certainly Hell seems the appropriate place for the war makers. With a hint of malice God suggests that He will ensure that His judgement day is far hotter. He concedes that He may not bother, though, as eternal rest seems more suited to the human condition. The scriptural image of the blowing of the trumpet that signa...