Poem of the Day: ‘Channel Firing’

From the little-known poem “The Rejected Member’s Wife” to the widely anthologized Christmas poem “The Oxen,” the Sun has presented several works by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) in its Poem of the Day feature. Today we add another anthology poem, one of the A-Side hits of Hardy’s catalogue. And why not? Hardy’s large corpus is an inexhaustible well of formal verse from which to draw. And “Channel Firing” shows Hardy in several of his modes: comic, apocalyptic, compiling a catalogue of human types, and displaying a wry sense of English history.The poem also shows the poet’s steady technical skill at rhyme and meter. In nine stanzas of tetrameter quatrains, rhymed abab, Hardy imagines that British navy, with its gunnery practice in the English Channel, has awakened the dead, sleeping in their churchyard graves: “That night your great guns, unawares, / Shook all our coffins as we lay, . . . / We thought it was the Judgment-day.”Published just months before the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the poem notes the rise of modern war: “All nations striving strong to make / Red war yet redder.” And it gently mocks the village type of Parson Thirdly (so called, presumably, because his overlong sermons included the dread word “thirdly” as they turned to yet another topic). But then the naval guns roar again, and their sound rolls back into ancient England, “As far inland as Stourton Tower, / And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.”Channel Firingby Thomas HardyThat night your great guns, unawares,Shook all our coffins as we lay,And broke the chancel window-squares,We thought it was the Judgment-dayAnd sat upright. While drearisomeArose the howl of wakened hounds:The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,The worms drew back into the mounds,The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No;It’s gunnery practice out at seaJust as before you went below;The world is as it used to be:“All nations striving strong to makeRed war yet redder. Mad as hattersThey do no more for Christés sakeThan you who are helpless in such matters.“That this is not the judgment-hourFor some of them’s a blessed thing,For if it were they’d have to scourHell’s floor for so much threatening . . .“Ha, ha. It will be warmer whenI blow the trumpet (if indeedI 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 underIn 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 Stonehenge.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Channel Firing’

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