[David Anthony]

Originally Posted by David Anthony

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

--How ignorant of me. I took the revision for the original. Scuttling out shamefacedly.

[Lance Levens]

Maryann,

I'm not sure I fully understand what you're saying, but I think I do, and I think you may be right. In the poems in this section he seems to be extracting whatever inclines us to recognize a Cummings, Dickinson or Hardy. I'll post another from this section tomorrow.

[Christopher ONeill]

Quite a small point - but possibly of use to somebody.

Hodge is very much a West Country name (in most cases, it is a diminutive of 'Robert'). But a particular feature of Hodge is that it can occur both as a surname (equivalent to the more widespread 'Roberts') but also as a familiar Christian name. So we don't know whether Drummer Hodge was actually a Mr. Hodge, or Mr. Robert Smith - who was called Hodge Smith by his friends (especially by his friends in Dorset).

Not being quite sure whether we have the Drummer's first name or surname is already a hint of how the Army has eroded his identity, and now death will erode it further.

......

Vaughn on the other hand is Welsh; or rather, he isn't.

Vaughan is the usual English version of the Welsh surname Fychan (Little). So already, we know that Vaughn is identified by surname only (as officers always are, men can be referred to by either name).

But this isn't a Vaughan, he is a Vaughn. And he is from London.

A Vaughan who has been in London long enough to fully adjust his name to English spelling conventions (as far as possible) is likely to have been there a long time. In fact, many English readers (and almost all Welsh readers) seeing Vaughn as a surname would assume that Mr. Vaughn probably goes back to the tsunami of carpetbagging Welshmen who followed the Tudors to power in London after the Battle of Bosworth. Since by far the most successful of this first wave of Welsh colonisation was Elizabeth I's spymaster Lord Cecil (Cecil is Seisyll - another good Welsh name) when an informed reader comes upon Vaughn he is going to immediately suspect someone who is posh, servile, and probably dodgy.

There is so much going on in the substitution of Hodge with Vaughn that I am almost surprised Snodgrass found such a serendipity.

He must have loved this poem very much indeed to take the trouble to treat it so badly.

[derek fenton]

In Southern Africa a 'kopje' is a hill. We used to go kopje climbing as kids. The Karoo is a semi desert area in South Africa.
It looks like this is referring to The Boer War. The foreign constellations would be the skies in the Southern Hemisphere under which Drummer Hodge would have been buried.

[Maryann Corbett]

There is so much going on in the substitution of Hodge with Vaughn that I am almost surprised Snodgrass found such a serendipity.

Thanks, Christopher, for returning to the thread to lay it all out. Sometimes there's virtue in bumping up a quiet thread on Mastery.

[Jerome Betts]

Christopher, I think your small point is so tiny as to be almost invisible.

The capped 'Drummer' strongly suggests Hardy was using a military rank on the lines of 'Private Smith' or 'Fusilier Jones'. I think the most you could say is that he might possibly have been using the associations of the generic 'Hodge' (= 'agricultural labourer - in a previous literary era it would have been 'Giles') to soften the bare surname with a flavour of a quasi first name. But would such a slightly patronising de haut en bas usage really accord with the spirit of Hardy's poem?

Vaughn is identified by surname only (as officers always are, men can be referred to by either name. I do not understand this. In a military context? Can you give some examples?

When an informed reader comes upon Vaughn he is going to immediately suspect someone who is posh, servile, and probably dodgy.' Only if they are suffering from some sort of historical chip on the shoulder, I would suggest.

Great news for all the Vaughns, Vaughans, Lloyds, Powells, Prices and Preeces I knew in and out of school on the Welsh border.

[Ann Drysdale]

Two names, but both were Drummers. It's not just a rank; it's a relatively passive contribution to the field of battle. In mourning a drummer, we mourn his paradiddles and ratacues and the hollow sense of waste is greater for the knowing. Their weapon was rimshot, not grapeshot; their rest is silence.

The starcrossed Trumpet Major, after all, left Hardy's story to blow his trumpet till silenced for ever upon one of the bloody battlefields of Spain.

And he was a Loveday. Best not go there, eh...

[Christopher ONeill]

Originally Posted by Jerome Betts

Vaughn is identified by surname only (as officers always are, men can be referred to by either name. I do not understand this. In a military context? Can you give some examples?

One of many possible loca classica would be the Five Unmistakable Marks section of David Jones' In Parenthesis - where we meet Lazarus Cohen, Wop Costello, Joe Donkins - and a dozen other forenamed private soldiers. But Sergeant Quilter is always only Sergeant Quilter. While the officer in charge of the attack is simply Mr. Jenkins.

David Jones actually makes a point of the difference between common soldiers with two names and officers with only one when the Queen of the Woods appears:

She plaits torques of equal splendour for Mr. Jenkins and Billy Crower

[Jerome Betts]

Christopher, I'm sorry but David Jones's idiosyncratic literary work of a later date is not evidence for normal civilian or military usage at the time Hardy wrote his poem.

In any case, in the Snodgrass 'decomposition' Vaughn is no more distinguished by surname only than is Hodge. Both are twice referred to as Drummer (Drummer So-and-So, Young so-and-so,the Drummer,) and by surname alone once each. The name Vaughn has simply been substituted for Hodge without any other change.

[Gregory Dowling]

I've just come across this passage in Tess of the D'Urbevilles, describing Angel Clare's reactions to working on the farm alongside the other labourers:

Much to his surprise he took, indeed, a real delight in their companionship. The conventional farm-folk of his imagination--personified in the newspaper-press by the pitiable dummy known as Hodge--were obliterated after a few days' residence. At close quarters no Hodge was to be seen. At first, it is true, when Clare's intelligence was fresh from a contrasting society, these friends with whom he now hobnobbed seemed a little strange. Sitting down as a level member of the dairyman's household seemed at the outset an undignified proceeding. The ideas, the modes, the surroundings, appeared retrogressive and unmeaning. But with living on there, day after day, the acute sojourner became conscious of a new aspect in the spectacle. Without any objective change whatever, variety had taken the place of monotonousness. His host and his host's household, his men and his maids, as they became intimately known to Clare, began to differentiate themselves as in a chemical process. The thought of Pascal's was brought home to him: "A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit, on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux. les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de difference entre les hommes." The typical and unvarying Hodge ceased to exist. He had been disintegrated into a number of varied fellow-creatures--beings of many minds, beings infinite in difference; some happy, many serene, a few depressed, one here and there bright even to genius, some stupid, others wanton, others austere; some mutely Miltonic, some potentially Cromwellian; into men who had private views of each other, as he had of his friends; who could applaud or condemn each other, amuse or sadden themselves by the contemplation of each other's foibles or vices; men every one of whom walked in his own individual way the road to dusty death.