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Channel Firing. 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.
English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy wrote "Channel Firing" in 1914, just months before World War I began. The poem imagines a graveyard that is disturbed by the noise of warships firing their guns out at sea. Although the firing is only practice, not an actual battle, the noise is enough to wake the dead in the graveyard.
- Summary of Channel Firing
- Themes in Channel Firing
- Structure and Form
- Literary Devices
- Analysis of Channel Firing
- Similar Poems
In the first part of the poem, Hardy’s speaker, a skeleton, wakes up to the noises of guns firing overhead. He believes, falsely, that these are the sounds of Judgement Day. God speaks to them dead, telling them that the noises are only guns firing out across the water. God also informs the dead that it’s a good thing that Judgement Day isn’t upon ...
‘Channel Firing’ is centered around the obvious theme of war. Additionally, Hardy touches on religion and the afterlife. These themes are universal, meaning that throughout time men and women have thought about them and written about them. In this case, Hardy emphasizes that fact by describing war as something that has gone on endlessly. It darkly ...
‘Channel Firing’ by Thomas Hardy is a nine-stanza poem that is separated into sets of four lines, known as quatrains. These quatrains follow a simple rhyme schemeof ABAB CDCD, changing end sounds from stanza to stanza. The lines are all relatively similar in length, with each containing somewhere between eight and ten syllables. The majority of the...
Hardy makes use of several literary devices in ‘Channel Firing’. These include but are not limited to examples of caesurae, alliteration, imagery, and enjambment. The first of these, alliteration, is seen through the repetitionof words that start with the same consonant sound. For example, “great guns” in line one of the first stanza and “Red” and ...
Stanza One
In the first stanza of ‘Channel Firing,’ the speaker begins by using the second-personpronoun “you” to address all the living soldiers firing their guns. The poem is coming from the perceptive of a man who has already died, a skeleton lying in his coffin, awoken by the sounds ringing out overhead. To the skeletons, who have already met their deaths, it felt to them like Judgement Day, as written in the Bible, was upon them. The skeleton speaker also describes the “chancel,” or part of the chu...
Stanza Two
The skeleton, and his companions, woke up from their sleep, and each part of the world around shook with what was about to occur. Hardy uses animals as symbols to foreshadowwhat’s to come. They know that something terrible is on the horizon, even if living human beings aren’t totally aware. Although it seems like it, this is not, in fact, judgment day.
Stanza Three
In the third stanza of the poem, God confirms that no, this is not Judgement day. This is “gunnery practice out at sea”. He adds onto this, telling the skeletons that things have not changed since they were alive. Death still rules, and more is to come. The same sounds are echoing around the world, and the same soldiers are marching to their deaths.
Readers who enjoyed Hardy’s ‘Channel Firing’ should also look into Hardy’s other best-known poems. For example, ‘And There Was a Great Calm,’ ‘Wessex Heights,’ and ‘The Convergence of the Twain’. The first of these is also concerned with war. In it, Hardy describes the horrors of World War I and the “Great Calm” which came on November 11th, 1918. S...
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Aug 22, 2016 · Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘Channel Firing’ is one of his most popular poems; it was also, perhaps, the most prophetic. Written in April 1914 and published in May of the same year, just a few months before the outbreak of the First World War, it anticipates the conflict that would break out later that year. (Hardy would later write about the war ...
Channel Firing. Thomas Hardy. 1840 –. 1928. That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgement-day. And sat upright.
Sep 5, 2023 · Last Updated September 5, 2023. Thomas Hardy's "Channel Firing" is one of his most well-known poems. Written in 1914, it takes as its subject the gunnery practice which took place off...
Sep 5, 2023 · by Thomas Hardy. Summary. Themes. Questions & Answers. Analysis. Characters. Quotes. Summary. PDF Cite Share. D. Reynolds, M.A. | Certified Educator. Last Updated September 5, 2023. Hardy's...
