War…What Is It Good For?
As in the song, Hardy’s poem reaches the conclusion that war—at least the Boer War which this poem references—was good for very little in comparison to the havoc it wreaked. The British were engaged in what some describe as the first guerrilla war against the Boers in South Africa and the conflict is sometimes referred retroactively as “England’s Vietnam.” The British ultimately triumphed but basically in a sense of winning the battle but losing the war. England gained very little from their victory on the battlefield and consequently would lose a great deal, which makes the deaths of men like the husband and the widowing of his young wife all the more tragic and senseless.
The Other Victim of the Battlefield
Make no mistake: this is an anti-war poem. Hardy shifts the focus from the typical subject of such verse—the soldier and the horrors of the battle—to reveal that when a husband dies in some far-off land fighting for his country or some politician’s goal, he is far from the only victim. Many other anti-war poems focus on women, but usually it is the mother simply because most soldiers are victims of their age. Teenage males sent overseas do not routinely make habits of arranging marriages in advance. Mothers have been at the center of anti-war poetry because mothers are, of course, more symbolic than young, childless widows. Hardy takes a stand with this poem that is not just limited to taking the politically risky move of appearing unpatriotic by criticizing a specific war; he also takes a stand by insisting that motherhood is not the only casualty of war.
The Perpetual State of War
The poem is universal in that the actual specificities of the conflict are only alluded to through the date and a reference to the battle taking place in some “far South Land.” Neither the wife nor the husband are named. The location of the their home is implied only to the extent of being somewhere “in London” equipped with electric streetlights. Most importantly, however, is the poet’s choice for tense. From the opening “She sits in the tawny vapour” to the husband’s dreams of coming home for “well-planned jaunts” this is a poem situated in a perpetual present. The rejection of the use of past tense rips it out of history and makes it relevant to any husband and wife in any country during a time of any war with the suggestion that somewhere on the planet at any given moment there is always some wife waiting for her soldier husband to make it safely back home.
