Poem Of The Week

[jazzy_dave]

Thomas Hardy was a poet as well as being a novelist.


The Pity of It
BY THOMAS HARDY
April 1915

I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar
From rail-track and from highway, and I heard
In field and farmstead many an ancient word
Of local lineage like 'Thu bist,' 'Er war,'

'Ich woll', 'Er sholl', and by-talk similar,
Nigh as they speak who in this month's moon gird
At England's very loins, thereunto spurred
By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are.

Then seemed a Heart crying: 'Whosoever they be
At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame
Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we,

'Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame;
May their familiars grow to shun their name,
And their brood perish everlastingly.'



Source: Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems (Palgrave, 2001)

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I take it it's primarily the bits of dialect you're hanging up on? I'm American myself, but I've been reading verse by people like Hardy, Kipling, and Lawrence since my teens, so I'll essay it: What Hardy is doing is taking rural pronunciations of common English phrases (sometimes grammatically archaic by the standards of the Queen's English) and saying how similar they are to German phrases with the same meaning. Thus

thu bist = "thou beest": du bist
er war = "he were": er war
ich woll = "I will": ich will
er sholl = "he shall": er soll

And from this, he's drawing the point that the English and the Germans are of common descent and common linguistic heritage and it's a damned shame for them to be killing each other.

[ba1126.livejournal.com]

Thanks!! I thought that was the gist of it, but I appreciate the info!!