[Susan d.S.]

I think the last stanza of the re-write is the most "ruined." But I sort of see what Ann does not hate about this version. I haven't quite figured it out, but there is something in it that reminds me of Romantic poetry: bits of Shelley, bits of Coleridge, bits of Wordsworth. Could that be it?

[John Whitworth]

Gregory, this is only just relevant. I am talking about Edward Thomas's Lob. The book I learned to read from at school was about a farmer and his farm. It went:

I am old Lob
I am Mr Dan
I am Mrs Cuddy
I am Mrs Hen
We are the chicks.
I am Percy, the bad chick.

Sheer poetry. Mr Dan was a collie dog and Mrs Cuddy was a cow (though se should surely have been a horse). Percy the bad chick was black, but I think that was for non-racist reasons. When I read this masterpiece I had never seen a black person in real life.

[Michael Cantor]

Intriguing, and I can see where the approach can be a hell of a teaching tool, or just a discussion tool. I can even see competitions - on Drills & Amusements, perhaps, or The Discerning Eye - to see who can more creatively flatten a good poem. Go to it, Lance - Kipling might offer some juicy opportunities.

I agree with others that the deconstructed poem in this instance is still not bad - better than the first and second examples. And I also agree that Hodge has a very different connotation than Vaughn. Hodge is a lump of a lad, Anglo Saxon right down to his thick toe nails; and Vaughn is taller, slimmer and far more refined. Possibly Norman blood. Everybody knows that. (I just bounced it off First Reader, and not only doesn't she know it, but she thinks I'm strange. Oh well.)

I particularly like what was done with "kopje-crest" in both the original and the rewrite, because the introduction of foreign words - with just enough context to make them work, and provide spice and imagery - is something I often attempt. Hardy did it well, and the deconstruction demonstrates just how effectively the language works.

[David Anthony]

I think this one improves on the original.
It's the particulars, I believe.

[Jerome Betts]

"That country's hue" is terribly flat and general by contrast. (Maryann). Indeed, and what are the 'woods' in the same quatrain? Not a word usually associated with S.Africa or the parts of it the war was fought in. And 'tropic tree'? Only the northernmost fringe of S.Africa is in the tropics - most of it is sub-tropical and the general climate is warm temperate, Mediterranean in the Western Cape. This might seem a bit pedantic, but 'tropic' suggests lush vegetation, rain-forest etc. I think Hardy's wording carries a strong implication that Wessex was a lot greener than Hodge;s resting-place.

[Ann Drysdale]

Perhaps Vaughn lies in a different war-zone. Perhaps he is a different soldier. If you are going to update Hardy - and this thread needs us to consider the second poem in that way because of the epigraph - you would not hammer home the connection with the Boer War. The heart and soul of the thing seems to me to be the suggestion that there is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.

[Jerome Betts]

Ann, if you are going to 'update Hardy' wouldn't you need to write a completely new piece on the same theme? This 'decomposed' version just seems to me vague and homogenised Hardy-lite, with the specifiucs lost except the different stars. Anyway, they bring the bodies back now.

Anthony, I just don't follow you. Could you expand?

[Ann Drysdale]

I'm sorry, Jerome; I plead guilty to muddled thinking. I keep swerving from the basic premise of the thread. We are presented with a poem that we are told is the ruination of another and I feel an inexplicable need to defend it, or at least the reasons for it. Perhaps, not seeing the need to "improve" Hardy, I am seeking other answers to a question I have only partly understood.

But - that's what you do when you're ruined. Said she.

[Maryann Corbett]

I need to gather more evidence, but I'm starting to think that Snodgrass's aims and methods are less fully thought out in the "singular voice" section of the book than in the others.

What he's taken out, it appears, is the set of elements that link the poem to a specific poet, whether those elements related to place or time or language quirks or whatever. He's removed not what makes Hardy good but what makes Hardy Hardy. It's true that specifics make things vivid. But it's quite possible that broader terms could convey a moving idea effectively.

Perhaps Lance will give us another sample from this section--without telling us so, of course.

[ChrisGeorge]

Thanks for this, Lance.

Hardy was a trained architect, an artist, and a local historian (if an amateur one) as well as a poet and novelist. Therefore, much as he had to be exact in designing a church, say, Hardy noticed and transmitted to his readers exact details about anything he wrote about.

If you read any of his prose, his short stories or his novels, you see everything through the eyes of his characters. If Angel Clare of Tess of the D'Urbervilles or Michael Henchard, the eponymous mayor of The Mayor of Casterbridge, are in a field in Wessex, you notice every detail of the field, and the light in that field at that moment.

So, similarly in Hardy's poetry, the details of Drummer Hodge's character and the nature of the terrain in South Africa where he is buried "uncoffined" are exactly noted by the poet. The poignancy of his burial in that strange place is thus singly impressed upon the reader.

Lance, your deconstruction of "Drummer Hodge" well demonstrates the brilliance of Hardy's poem. Many thanks for that. Hardy's "Drummer Hodge" as well as "The Man He Killed" although both written about the Boer War rather than the Great War, rank among the best of war poetry, along with work by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, in World War I and Keith Douglas in World War II.

Best regards

Chris