A Comparison of Setting: Eliot and Hardy Amelie Maurice-Jones 12th Grade

Victorian poet Thomas Hardy- having immensely enjoyed a childhood in the idyllic county of Dorset- was a stoic believer in the transformative power of nature which is explored through settings in both ‘Drummer Hodge’, and ‘Afterwards’ as nature is imbued with the ultimate power of overcoming death. Modernist poet TS Eliot writes of a period in which such natural power has been exhausted and polluted by an industrial landscape; and similarly conveys this through setting in his verse. Thus, whilst both poets use settings to offer insight into their central concerns; the utopian countryside settings of Hardy’s verse arguably subvert Eliot’s ruined metropolis in which both nature and human inhabitants are corrupted.

In ‘Afterwards’, Hardy uses an idyllic natural setting in order to explore the capacity of nature to transcend mortality and memorialise human life. Such is demonstrated through the vibrant imagery of a natural setting in the opening stanza, which is linked with alliteration in phrases such as ‘the May month flaps its glad green leaves’ to mark out the transformative power of nature, especially when juxtaposed with the sparse descriptions of humanity (‘He was a man…’) despite it being the poem’s central theme....