Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/249

 The whole group of war-poems ends on a rather forbidding note: the poet's vigorous renunciation of the instinctive joy in life that makes him "want to write a book" in a world so full of horrors that the truly wise man should want to drown himself as did the father of a son slain in battle.

A remarkable complexity of emotion and ratiocination was here exhibited. Loyalty to his native country and indignation against her enemies alternated with feelings of horror at the suffering and misery caused by the irrational patriotic impulse—at one time jingoism was suggested; at another, pacificism. Taken as a whole, they are a most illuminating reflection of the confused spirit and temper of the time. In The Dynasts also, although the setting is that of the Napoleonic wars, we may discover an "occasional" tendency. Again the mental situation of the world at the opening of the new century is represented by the complexity of ideas and feelings exhibited in the dilemmas that one inevitably finds inherent in the work—the natural human passion and patriotic fervor of the poet—an Englishman in spite of himself—frequently run away with the wider, deeper, and more richly colored, but purely intellectual predetermined philosophical program. This is felt particularly in the Prologue and the Epilogue composed for the first public performance of parts of The Dynasts in 1914.

Another type of occasional poetry found in the Hardy-volumes is that of the lyric obituary. Mention has already been made of the poems written upon the death of Meredith, and of Swinburne, of Barnes, and of Hardy's own grandmother. To these might be added The Abbey