The Theme of Identity in Eliot's and Hardy's Poetry Grace Peters 12th Grade

Hardy explores the loss of identity in a society that pursues the horrors of war, in “Drummer Hodge”, which considers callousness of the Boer war in its denial of individual humanity and identity. Hardy uses a foreign landscape to contrast the young soldier to portray how identity is displaced in war. The setting is strikingly unfamiliar to an English audience, with “foreign constellations”, “strange eyed constellations” and Afrikaans words “kopje” and “Karoo” orientating the reader to the setting. Here Hardy disrupts even the secured familiarity of the constellations, personifying them into something ominous with “strange – eyed”. This foreign landscape is then contrasted with the rural simplicity of “Hodge” – whose very name conveys both the rural nature of his “Wessex home”, and the universality of the young victims of war – both awarding and denying “Hodge” of identity. The lack of a forename emphasizes this. The anonymity of the opening “They” removes identity from much of the poem as those burying Hodge are identified as neither his comrades nor his enemies, suggesting that no party is absolved from participating in war. Hodges final assimilation into the natural landscape - “his homely northern breast and brain/ Grown to...