[Maryann Corbett]

I think Ann's right that the emotional structure of the poem hasn't been altered. But some of its color has been drained. Let's look at what's been changed: everything not typical of modern conversational English, in diction and in syntax.

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest

Hodge > Vaughn. I think this is just to distinguish one version from the other.

Uncoffined--just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest

A foreign word, one that left a hole in my head until I looked it up--but then, what a striking visual effect!

That breaks the veldt around;

Another foreign word, fortunately this time one I know, and that conjures a lot of visual and historical specificity. A pattern appears: specificity and place and time are being bashed out of the poem.

And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

"West" as a verb is nonstandard; it grabs our attention. Was it nonstandard to the same degree to Hardy's contemporaries?

II

Young Hodge, the Drummer, never knew--
Fresh from his Wessex home--

Wessex > London. It's true that more people can call up images of London, but for those why know that Wessex is important to Hardy's novels, it's clear that this word was a significant part of what was in his head when he wrote this poem.

The two commas isolating "the Drummer" and that cap on Drummer are also gone. I'm less sure of what they contribute to the original, but their absence helps me see what Snodgrass what aiming to change.

The meaning of the broad karoo,

Another word I had to look up, and another term for a very specific geological/geographical feature. "That country's hue" is terribly flat and general by contrast.

The bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

A grammatical inversion, and another word that wouldn't occur in modern conversation. I think, though, that Hardy's audience would have found inversions more congenial than we do, and they would have been perfectly accustomed to items of poetic diction like "gloam." Around here, we would probably take a new poet to task for those. Are we always right? I'm less than certain.

III

Yet portion of that unknown plain

A noun without an article. I can just hear us saying "forced for meter!!!" I'd like to know more about why Hardy found it acceptable, and why his audience did.

Will Hodge for ever be;

I think this is just a case where modern spelling has closed up a two-word compound, but I'd have to do more look-up.


His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,

"Homely" is changed because its most common current meaning is not what Hardy meant: characteristic of home. "Breast" is changed because we don't use it conversationally to mean "heart"; only poetic diction does that. But if we axe it, we lose an alliteration.

Perhaps "Northern" and "Southern" are changed because what they meant to Hardy gets confused in the thinking of his American students, who'll automatically think of the US Civil War.


And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.

This last set of changes doesn't fit my thesis, but it does take out all the figures of speech in these lines, reducing them to a flat literal statement. "Strange-eyed" is a personification, as is the idea of constellations reigning, and the idea that they "reign his stars" alludes to the ancient notion of one's stars as one's fate, which hauls in memories of a lot of other, older literature.

I haven't discussed the changes in punctuation. There are quite a few, and I think they fit the pattern of nonstandard to standard. Whether they greatly affect the workings of the poem, I'm less sure; I'll need to think harder. Their effect seems much smaller than the other changes.

The more of these I work on, the more strongly it strikes me that when we critique poems on the board, we have the hard job of trying to see what the poem doesn't have that it might--of imagining the perfect poem that's been somehow de-composed in the execution.

I've exercised a lot of self-control in not looking at the book before thinking about this! I'll do that later.