Thanks for this thread, Aaron. Very interesting to see Larkin's and Hardy's poems side by side, so to speak.
Paul Fussell's great book on the literature of the First World War, The Great War and Modern Memory, actually begins with a discussion of Hardy's volume Satires of Circumstance, which came out in November 1914 - meaning that most of the poems were written before the war (there's just one patriotic and seemingly non-ironic poem tacked on at the end, "Men Who March Away", which refers specifically to the war). Analysing poems like "Channel Firing", Fussell says Hardy almost wrote the war before it happened. He says: “One reason modern English poetry can be said to begin with Hardy is that he is the first to invite into poems the sound of ominous gunfire heard across the water.” And Hardy himself wrote about “Channel Firing” that he had not foreseen “the coming so soon of such a convulsion as the war, though only three or four months before it broke out he had printed a prophetic poem […] whereof the theme, ‘All nations striving strong to make / Red war yet redder,’ was, to say the least, a perception singularly coincident.”
It's not surprising that Sassoon was a great admirer of Hardy's poetry.
And the Penguin anthology of First World War Poetry edited by Jon Silkin actually begins with Hardy's poem "Drummer Hodge", which dates from the Boer War, precisely because it seems to anticipate Brooke's sonnet "The Soldier". Here are the two poems:
Drummer Hodge
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.
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.
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.
The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
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