Essay Questions

This poem is a panoply of literary devices and techniques. In addition to rhyme, metaphor and alliteration, identify two other examples.

Onomatopoeia is the verbal expression of a sound to convey a certain mood or tone. The opening line of the second stanza engages this device with the phrase “A messenger's knock cracks smartly” as a means of creating a very specific sound standing in harsh contrast with the slow-moving atmosphere of fog and fading light established in the first stanza. It is almost the equivalent of a jump scare in a horror movie with the cracking sound shocking the wife into action and emotion. The “smartly” aspect of this cracking sound of a knock at the door by the messenger also sets up the utilization of euphemism as a literary device intended to soften the harshness of a message; in this case the husband’s likely quite violent and messy death on the battlefield has been politely transformed into merely having “fallen” in a “far South Land.”

What is the significance of the poet’s decision to describe the gas-powered streetlight as waning and turning cold?

The streetlamp is the key metaphor creating an associational link with the wife. A paradox is established verging on the oxymoronic with the description of a gas flame’s glimmer as something cold. Normally, one would associated a gas flame with heat. The paradox offers a symbolic insight into psychology of the wife of a soldier away at war: hope is what keeps them from going mad with worry, but hope is also inherent built to fade with time. With each passing day that she has not heard that sharp crack on the door of a messenger knocking and waiting to deliver bad news, the hope of that bad news never actually arriving becomes more fragile. It is a hot wish specifically built to be extinguished one day by the cold water of inescapable reality: soldiers are trained to kill with the paradoxical acceptance that this means they are also meant to be killed. The waning taper that is the street-lamp is a metaphor for the waning hope that she will be one of the lucky soldier’s wives to live through another day without tragedy.

What does it say about the writer’s anti-war perspective that his poem about a late 19th century war follows almost the exact same narrative as a rock song about a late 20th century war?

The similarities between the story told in Harding’s poem and that told in the lyrics to the 1985 New Order song “Love Vigilantes” are so striking that it actually enhances the one single vital differentiation between how the two stories end. New Order’s song is told in the form of a first-person monologue by a soldier who has been fighting in an unnamed country identified only as “the land of the sun.” Compare to the poem’s decision to eschew the precision of identifying the battleground of the Boer War directly and instead merely allude to it as “the far South Land.”

The singing soldier expresses lonely longing at the thought of finally returning to his wife (and child in this case) which turns into a confession of jubilation upon receiving the news that his leave has finally come and he be returning soon. This aligns with the description of the joyous mood of the same expectation contained in the husband’s letter to his wife which arrives tragically the day after she learns he has died. So exulted is New Order’s soldier about having done his duty to god and country and finally being rewarded with the chance to live for himself again that he actually briefly loses the ability to communicate through words and is reduced to an almost childlike happy repeating refrain of “do-do-do-do.”

It appears that the soldier of the 1980’s has managed to avoid the tragedy of transforming from trained killer to victim of trained killer when he describes walking through the door of his home. But, alas, the story is the same as it ever was: this British soldier’s wife lies prostrate on the floor sobbing in anguish and holding onto a piece of paper just like Hardy’s British soldier’s wife:

“Then I looked into her hand
And then I saw the telegram
Said that I was a brave, brave man
But that I was dead.”

Hardy’s poem is fiercely and uncompromisingly anti-war as he publicly stakes a stance in no uncertain terms that the Boer War was useless, futile waste of young lives supposedly in the service of a patriotic duty to god and country. The battlefield may have been different, the means of warfare may have been less brutal and the political aims exploited in the name of jingoistic nationalism may have differed, but the sense Hardy’s poetic construction brings to the idea that war is cyclical and ever-repeating is brought into crystal clear perspective through a narrative conveyed in song almost a century later which strongly suggests that nothing has changed---not even with the benefit of the hindsight of two global catastrophic wars that Hardy likely could never have imagined.