[hardy-l] Iron Age War Grave

[JoAnna Mink]

Thanks, Rebecca, for passing along the article about the amazing find of the mass burial near Maiden Castle.  Knowing this adds another dimension to Hardy's atmospheric story "A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork."  For years, I've been trying to convince someone to go there with me at midnight so we could read the story in situ.  So far, no takers.

 

But I also thought of one of my favorite poems by Hardy, "By the Barrows" (CP 216), where "A battle, desperate doubtless unto death, / Was one time fought."  But, in the final stanza, a typical Hardyean comment: 

Here once a woman, in our modern age,

Fought singlehandedly to shield a child --

One not her own -- from a man's senseless rage.

And to my mind no patriots' bones there piled

So consecrate the silence as her deed

Of stoic and devoted self-unheed.


To me, the fact that it was not her own child makes the moral.

 

Cheers,

JoAnna


JoAnna S. Mink
Professor Emerita of English




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