RPO -- Thomas Hardy : In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"

1Only a man harrowing clods

2 In a slow silent walk

3With an old horse that stumbles and nods

4 Half asleep as they stalk.

5Only thin smoke without flame

6 From the heaps of couch-grass;

7Yet this will go onward the same

8 Though Dynasties pass.

III

9Yonder a maid and her wight

10 Come whispering by:

11War's annals will cloud into night

12 Ere their story die.

Notes

1] Jer. li. 20. [Hardy's note] "Thou art my battle ax and weapons of war: for with thee will I break in pieces the nations and with thee will I destroy kingdoms." Hardy confessed that this poem "contains a feeling that moved me in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war, when I chanced to be looking at such an agricultural incident in Cornwall. But I did not write the verses till during the war with Germany of 1914, and onwards" (Florence E. Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy [1967]: 378-79).
The 1917 edition concludes:

1915.
("Saturday Review.")

harrowing clods: breaking apart lumps of earth.

6] couch-grass: quack grass, a creeping weed.

9] wight: man.

Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.

Original text: Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan and Co., 1932): 511. PR 4741 F32 Robarts Library.
First publication date: 1917
Publication date note: 1916; Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (London: Macmillan, 1917): 232. H378 M645 1917 Fisher Rare Book Library
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 1998.
Recent editing: 2:2002/2/13

Composition date: 1915
Rhyme: abab

Other poems by Thomas Hardy