Thomas Hardy- 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 forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellation reign
His stars eternally.


Response #7: Explain cultural or historical context and how it relates to the poem.

Hardy’s “Drummer Hodge” reveals not only his ideas about the cost of war but also about the societal prejudices of the Victorian age. As Hardy explains in his Tess of the D’Urbervilles, northern England’s farming class was disdained by wealthier city-dwellers, a stereotype referred to as “Hodge.” In Tess of the D’Urbervilles he introduces, and shows his disdain for, the idea of calling an entire class by a single family name: “The conventional farm-folk of...imagination - [were] personified by the pitiable dummy known as Hodge.” Ironically, in both novel and poem Hardy uses the single name to refer to a stereotyped group of people in their defense, rather than to condescend once again, as the wealthy would.
The hero of the poem is part of the condescended group, but Hardy humanizes him in focusing on him during his final, and most anonymous, moment. Just as Hodge is tossed into a makeshift grave, far from home, Hardy gives him sympathy by addressing his innocence and sense of being lost: “Young Hodge the Drummer never knew/ Fresh from his Wessex home.” Although the young man in the poem was condescended in life and quickly left behind in death, Hardy pays him tribute with provocative and profound phrases such as “Strange-eyed constellations reign his stars eternally,” suggesting that in death his fate is decided by the patterns of the stars that “reign” the skies above him, much as it was decided in life by his station in society. Therefore, Hardy blames both war and society for Hodge’s tragic fate.