奇妙な出会・ハーディからオウエンまでの戦争詩(1) : ハーディとブルック

Abstract

Wars are, in a sense, strange meetings of soldiers with their enemies, of one culture with another, of military fame with homely joys of daily life, of life with death. Hardy wrote a few poems about Boer War which was fought in South Africa. His "Drummer Hodge" and " The Souls of the Slain" are the very examples of the strange meetings. The war was a meeting place of Drummer Hodge with strange constellations of Southern hemisphere after he was killed and buried in a lone place of foreign country. "The Souls of the Slain" shows us another case of a strange meeting of two confronting thoughts : military fame and happy ordinary life. Hardy thought that war was pity as Owen thought it so. Rupert Brooke wrote a famous poem "The Soldier" which reminds us Hardy's "Drummer Hodge" though the tones of the two poems are different. We can notice that there is a subdued ironical atmosphere in Hardy's poems though Brooke's "The Soldier" is rather idealistic and optimistic. The difference of their tones comes from the facts that Brooke was a young promising scholar with English literary background and that he did not know what the modern war was like since the war was still young. On the contrary, Hardy was an old prominent novelist and poet who had enough experience to understand pity of war.