A 3rd Ruined Poem: Drummer Hodge
 

I

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined--just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

II

Young Hodge, the Drummer, never knew--
Fresh from his Wessex home--
The meaning of the broad karoo,
The bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

III

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.





Drummer Vaughn
-de/composed from Hardy

I

They throw in Drummer Vaughn to rest
Uncoffined, just as found;
His landmark is a little crest
That marks the landscape 'round,
And strange stars circle toward the west
Each night above his mound.

II

Young Vaughn the Drummer never knew--
Fresh from his London home--
The meaning of that country's hue,
The woods he had to roam.
Or why strange stars rose into view
Each night in heaven's dome.

III

A part, though, of that foreign plain
Vaughn will now come to be;
His simple English heart and brain
Become some tropic tree;
Strange constellations will remain
Above him endlessly.

This is really an excellent teaching method. There's a whole session here, maybe more, depending on the intelligence of the pupils. Is one allowed to call them pupils?

He is the teacher of those school pupils.

He is the facilitator of those kids in their learning environment.

I am fascinated by this thread and with this third poem there is a dawning of the idea's relevance to translation - Oh, what have I, on so many occasions, done?

And now I'm going to say something I may regret. I don't think this reworked version does as much of a disservice to the original as did the others. It moves me. Had I seen it alone I'd have rated it highly. But why do I think this?

Had the original been in Latin, say, would I have felt...? We've lost South Africa - is that as important as I feel I ought to think it is? I'm off back inside my head to find out. I may have spoken too soon...

I'm guessing this one has to with Hardy's vigorous and unconventional use of verbs and unconventional syntax. There is also a flattening of diction in #2, but that seems to go with the more straightforward sentence structure. I vastly prefer the original.

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.

Maryann, the name Hodge is earthy, peasant in a way the name Vaughn is not. Dr Johnson's cat was Hodge. Vaugh(a)n is a metaphysical poet. Also Hodge clumps along but Vaughn flits.

And a kopje crest ties the poem to a real place and a real time.

Homely doesn't just mean pertaining to home. Hodge is a thickset, plain sort of a boy, rather like Rimbaud in his photographs, though I am sure he did not write poetry..

North and South - I do think American students might be expected to know tat an English poet is not referring to the American Civil War. An Atlas might help.

This raises an interesting question, John. Can a poet predict and/or control the connotations of names as easily as other kinds of words? I agree with your thoughts on Vaugh[a]n. But the only Hodge I know is an accomplished poet. Does your meaning have to do with sound associations, like "hod," as in a bricklayer's tool?

Exactly.

Indeed. Also simple, rural, a whole constellation of ideas related to, well, Wessex.

On this matter, there are things you're carrying in your head that I lack. Would you tell us more about why "Hodge" means this to you and why it might have meant that to Hardy?

I do too. I'm grasping at straws as to why Snodgrass made this particular change and I'd like to hear other people's ideas.

The dangers of political correctness.

Maryann, thanks for another brilliant and thought-provoking analysis. A few responses:

[that] cap on Drummer [are] also gone.

My screen shows it capitalized in both versions.

about grammatical inversions and non-standard word choices:

Are we always right? I'm less than certain.

I can just hear us saying "forced for meter!!!" [/i]

I'm glad to see this question raised. It is possible to make a series of local corrections and thus homogenize a poem too much in the name of intelligibility and natural speech.

The uncustomary verbs, such as "west" contribute to the strange atmosphere in which everything except Hodge is alive.

I think, too, that "portion" (in addition to filling the meter) may have been preferred because "portion" has philosophical and theological associations---what our portion in life is, what we are served, and, of course, a life cut short.

I have the same feeling about "Hodge," it is a stumpy, earthy Anglo-Saxon sort of name, especially compared to the more poetic Celticism of "Vaughn," with its silent consonants.

That the puncuation is relatively unaltered is indeed interesting.

Thanks,
Susan

The decomposition loses some of the music:
'kopje' picks up 'Hodge'
'Wessex' picks up 'fresh' and 'bush'
'stars eternally' picks up 'strange-eyed constellations'

'breast and brain' is an attractive alliteration, whereas the alliteration and internal rhyme of 'become some tropic tree' are clumsy.

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable gives us Hodge as a generic name for a farm labourer. Other dictionaries give country bumpkin. There i an attribution in 1885 referring to the Hodge vote, meaning the vote of the agricultural labourer.

Cardinal Vaughan - who was he? Probably subtle and untrustworthy. The English felt like that about Catholics, doubtless unfairly. Ah, I have him 'of a remarkably fine presence and aristocratic leanings'

Anyway, doesn't Hodge SOUND agricultural? Hodge plods through the sludge. I take it Johnson's cat was emphatically not slinky and siamese but foursquare and English, like Johnson in fact. I have a cat like that - Frank.

Maryann, some interesting points. Re 'kopje', maybe not in USA, but here there is a place, a hill, somewhere in Staffordshire, called Mow Cop, with the 'cop' element coming from copp meaning 'hill top'. An area of Liverpool (I think) football club's ground, or the supporters identified with that particular part, is called 'The Kop', apparently after the Boer War battle of Spion Kop, though the place-name 'cop' might also fit or reinforce the usage. How many Liverpool supporters consciously recall the Boer War when they refer to 'The Kop' I don't know, but it's a reminder of the fact that a few S. African topographical words - karoo, veldt, kopje, as in the poem - became very familiar to the newspaper and general reading public of the day through the writings of war reporters like Edgar Wallace and the young Churchill.

I would have thought 'to west' would have been as unusual as now, but taken as country speech by Hardy readers.

I would have thought that 'Drummer; was capped as a quasi-rank, or even actual rank (military anoraks may enlighten us) or form of military address, like 'Private Corbett! Report to Sergeant Whitworth for simile-drill!' :)

'Yet portion of that unknown plain' seems unforced to my ears. Connects in my mind with a phrase like 'part and parcel' where an article would be the forced element.

Thanks, John; a source new to me, but one I'll have to learn more about. I'll concede that the word meant this to Hardy.

My dictionaries mark this "chiefly British," and I only found it unabridged editions. I can imagine anthology editors arguing among themselves over whether students would need a note about this point. I would have needed one. But at least this tells me more about Snodgrass's aim.

I see; the -udge words are famous for being dumpy and negative: drudge, grudge, pudgy.

Wow! Thank you for mentioning this, John. The complete book, with searchable text, is available for free on Google Books! What a find! I could get lost in there for days... ;)

Thanks,

Bill

The connotations around the English name Hodge appear to be central. That single word and its connotations appear to stand against the foreign words and their connotations: kopje, Karoo and veldt. A connotation war? Or at least we can say that Snodgrass's deletion of all of the above--Hodge, kopje, Karoo, veldt-- dilutes some tension.

Translators: how to get the thick-set, dull-witted country boy Hodge's
info across merely by the choice of a name.

Re punctuation. In the first line the comma after "Hodge" calls my attention to what was done to Hodge's body. It was thrown in. Thunk! In the Snodgrass version, we push on through "to rest uncoffined." The upshot is that in the Snodgrass version I don't get to hear that "thunk," not unless I go back and parse the event. Then the dash after "uncoffined" registers N's anger and shock. This is how a brutal war works. No time to bury the dead. It's "thunk" and move on.

I think Hodge is definitely supposed to be a country boy, and probably a teenager as well - most drummers were. (See Kipling's wonderful story, "The Drums of the Fore and Aft". )

*****************

This may be a good place to mention that the mail just brought Jayne Osborn's book "Only Joking" with its wonderful cover picture:
Poet in a scenic landscape dictating --"When all at once I saw a bunch, A bunch of golden daffodils... No, it still doesn't sound right! "

Wonderful thread.

I see Hodge as a precursor of Edward Thomas's Lob. And, for those who know the poem, of Andrew Waterman's Buster.

And Vaughn, I suspect, is something of a cad (or possibly a bounder).

Wessex
 

Not his coinage, but Hardy revived Wessex and made it his own.

Marcia

I'm at home with the book now, and can report that Snodgrass gives us this poem and rewrite in a section of the book called "The Singular Voice." He gives that title, then all the poems, and only then the fuller explanation of what he's about. I think this is the core of it:

"Choice of subject, ideas, or details, levels of diction, rhythm, movement, and sound textures, of imagery and allusion--these qualities may tell us that we are hearing Gerard Manley Hopkins or E.E. Cummings or John Berryman. Just as many tribal groups feel a menace--often for good reason--from an unfamiliar dialect, many of us, fearing change or loss of power, feel threatened by a new voice in poetry. Yet individuality and novelty are particularly sought by modern artists and, just as in the sciences, have provided much richness and invention. Having got past the initial strangeness, there may be a marked pleasure in finding a once-alien voice to be familiar and reassuring."

I am still pushing this excellent headfood round my plate and nibbling at the tasty bits.

I am still struck by how my response (in this case) to the second poem changes when I remove the original from my thinking.

There's something I am reaching for and can't express (I've attempted it in a poem but that, rightly, can't be posted here); something to do with the poetic continuum, of how subject matter runs like a river and poets dip in as it runs past them and never (yet always) in the same place. The experience links, the language distances.

An example of what I mean is the being caught unaware by the singing of a bird. They roll on through our literary history - Keats's nightingale, Shelley's skylark, Hardy's thrush, Dun Karm's canary, Sassoon's nameless "everyone" who suddenly burst out singing - again and again they tap a poet on the shoulder.

I'll stop because I am not addressing the specific issue, but I am troubled by the thinking and will continue in my own time. Aspects of classical and foreign language translation are bothering me now and I am puzzling over a link with another forum. I can hear the voices of the adults in the next room "Just ignore her - she'll play like this for hours"...

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?

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.

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.

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

"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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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

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.

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: