In Time of "The Beaking of Nations" (Thomas Hardy)

.....I

Only a man harrowing clods
.....In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
.....Half asleep as they stalk.

.....II

Only thin smoke without flame
.....From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
.....Though Dynasties pass.

III
Yonder a maid and her wight
.....Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
.....Ere their story die.


Okay. Let's start with the literal meaning of the text. If there are words in this poem that you don't know, you should look them up. Why don't you go look at a version of the poem with footnotes? We learn that "harrowing clods" means "breaking apart lumps of earth"; "couch-grass" is "a creeping weed," and a "wight" is a "man."

Let's think about the first sentence as if it were prose: "Only a man harrowing clods/In a slow silent walk/With an old horse that stumbles and nods/Half asleep as they stalk." Do you notice anything funny about the grammar here? This sentence is a fragment: it is made up of a bunch of phrases and clauses that describe the man, but there is no main clause because there is no main verb. Here is the sentence, broken down:

"Only a man..."
What kind of man?
"a man harrowing clods [breaking apart lumps of earth]..."
Harrowing clods, how?
"harrowing clods/In a slow silent walk/With an old horse that stumbles and nods"
How does the horse nod?
"an old horse...stumbles and nods/Half asleep"
When?
"as they stalk."

What kind of image does this sentence provide? Hardy uses mostly visual images. Take a moment now and really picture all the details in your mind. Envision a man walking slowly through a field breaking apart lumps of earth, and next to him an old, half-asleep horse, stumbling and nodding along. That's a lot of visual detail and you ought to be able to make some kind of clear picture in your mind's eye. How does the picture make you feel? If you were to set it to music, what kind of music might you hear? What kind of colors might we picture in the scene? Probably no neon purple, right? What do you think?

Okay, next sentence: "Only thin smoke without flame/From the heaps of couch-grass;/Yet this will go onward the same/Though Dynasties pass." Let's break it down:

"Only thin smoke..."
What kind of smoke?
"smoke without flame..."
That's odd, and interesting. How can one have smoke and no flame? Where is the smoke?
"smoke...from the heaps of couch-grass [creeping weeds]..."
And here the stanza shifts! No longer do we have images: instead the poet makes an assertion, "Yet this will go onward the same." Do you see how this line is not an image?
Before we continue to consider the poet's assertion, take a moment to visualize the first two lines of this stanza: we see grassy weeds all piled up, and from these piles of weeds we see just a thin line of smoke rising into the air. Since the setting of the poem is agricultural, the horse, the man, and the piles of weeds are probably all in a field. Make the scene in your mind. Make sure that you see it in a very detailed way: the horse is slow and old, the weeds are grasses, the smoke is rising from the piles.

Now let's think about the assertion in the second half of the second stanza: "Yet this will go onward the same/Though Dynasties pass." What does it mean? What is "this"? The word "this" has no clear grammatical referent, so it must refer to the smoke over the piles of weeds, and maybe to the whole scene. What's a "dynasty"? It's the rule of a single family, of course, or a long period of history. Here's the sentence: "Yet this [the scene] will go onward the same,/Though Dynasties [long periods of history] pass." In other words, in spite of the long passage of history through the hands of different people and families, the habit of farmers in fields will be much the same. The habits of farmers are longer-lasting than the rule of emperors.

What do you think is the relationship between the "only" of lines 1 and 5 and the "yet" of line 7? Think about it.

In lines 9 and 10 we get a new image: "Yonder [over there] a maid [a young woman] and her wight [her young man]/Come whispering by..." Here, the word "whispering" is probably a sight image, not a sound image, because the phrase "yonder" (meaning "over there") suggests that the two people are too far away to be heard whispering. Can you envision two young, unmarried people walking through this picture, whispering to each other? How do people look when they whisper? How does the poet know they are whispering if he is far away? Probably they are leaning in toward each other; their physical posture must make it clear that they are whispering. They are probably not whispering bitterly to each other about the poor quality of the breakfast they just ate. The context of the poem suggests that they are whispering sweetly to each other. What is their relationship? They are probably in love. The use of the possessive pronoun "her" in line 9 suggests that they have a romantic relationship.

Now the poet gives us another assertion: "War's annals will cloud into night/Ere their story die." What does it mean? The word "annals," of course, refers to histories. "Ere" is an old-fashioned word meaning "before." Who does "their" refer to? To the woman and the man. What does the phrase "cloud into night" mean? How does history "cloud into night"? Can you picture something "clouding into night"? The preposition "into" here is used to suggest a process of becoming, as in the expression "turn into." This complex expression suggests that the history of war will gradually become cloudy. What does that metaphor suggest to you? As it becomes cloudy, it will somehow join the night or turn into night. What does that image suggest? In some drafts, Hardy used the word "fade" instead of "cloud," by the way. This phrase suggests that the history of war will fade out, will become dark or invisible at some point. The last two lines of the poem suggest that the history of war will fade out, will become dark or invisible, before the story of the two lovers dies out.

I want to suggest that there are two major groups, or sets of images, in this poem, and that they are contrasted with each other. One of them has to do with war and history; the other one has to do with farming and love. Reread the poem and look for those oppositions, and then analyze the poem again. Okay, young lady?