By Thomas Hardy
That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment-day And sat upright. While drearisome Arose the howl of wakened hounds: The mouse let fall the altar-crumb, The worms drew back into the mounds, The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No; It’s gunnery practice out at sea Just as before you went below; The world is as it used to be: “All nations striving strong to make Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters They do no more for Christés sake Than you who are helpless in such matters. “That this is not the judgment-hour For some of them’s a blessed thing, For if it were they’d have to scour Hell’s floor for so much threatening … “Ha, ha. It will be warmer when I blow the trumpet (if indeed I ever do; for you are men, And rest eternal sorely need).” So down we lay again. “I wonder, Will the world ever saner be,” Said one, “than when He sent us under In our indifferent century!” And many a skeleton shook his head. “Instead of preaching forty year,” My neighbour Parson Thirdly said, “I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.” Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.
This text follows Satires of Circumstance (Macmillan, 1919 printing), as transcribed by Project Gutenberg (eBook #2863), checked against Wikisource. The book was first published in 1914. Public domain.
Analysis
Written on the eve of World War I, “Channel Firing” imagines the dead jolted awake by naval exercises that seem apocalyptic. Hardy’s God, sardonic and weary, denies that the Last Judgment has come—war’s noise merely mimics it.
The poem indicts a civilization addicted to militarism, where Christian ethics have little sway and even clergy feel futile. By yoking parish imagery to Stonehenge and Camelot, Hardy sets modern aggression against a long cultural memory, suggesting that humanity’s violence is both ancient and unending.