A Wife in London - Thomas Hardy Flashcards
Thomas Hardy
This poem is one of many anti-war poems he wrote in ressponse to the Boer War
His works challenged Vicrotian sensibilities
Boer War
60,000 casualties
Victorian Era - British empire extered far-reaching control - some it was a source of pride, others like Hardy, not
Theme of War
anti-war poem that seeks to illuminate the absurdity and tragedy that go arm-in-arm with violent conflict. It is a message of war’s hopelessness—how war cuts life short needlessly
Wife as a microcosm
Deaths are immediaate and visceral, and eventually reduced to a figure in a book
Lack of patriotic language
lack of any heroism or honor—there is no patriotic language nor suggestion of noble sacrifice. The overall effect, then, makes the husband’s death feel devoid of meaning or purpose.
Use of distancing
the husband’s absence first at war and then in death—to bring the reality of war closer to the reader, who is made to feel the wife’s loss and thereby to reflect on bigger questions of what war actually acheives
‘she sits in the tawny vapour’
‘sits’ - sense of passivity, wife’s helplessness
‘tawny vapour’ pathetic fallacy - man-made, connotes a sense of self-imposed murkiness, like war
‘webby fold on fold’
Fog is unpleasantly inescapable, not dissimilar to a spider’s web, war is forebodingly rolling in, entrapping many lives with it
‘street lamp glimmers cold’
Oxymoronic - symbolises how her hopeful love and flame of faith will imminently be put out
‘knock cracks’
‘c’ percussive and onomatopeic - shattering of hope possibly
‘flashed news is in her hand’
Inverted word order gives emphasis to the ‘flashed news’ anastrophe -
‘flashed’ - fast, possibly telegram?
‘shaped so shortly’
Compact phrasing + alliterative ‘sh’s’ eflects the terseness of the telegram and its inadequacy in conveying news of this gravity
‘he-has fallen- in the far south land
euphenism of ‘fallen’
caesura exemplifies her intakes of sobs possibly
‘penned in highest feather’
Old phrase for written in high spirits
‘summer weather’
contradicts the fog starkly - positivity, free
