The Life of Thomas Hardy
Certainly they represent their author's most spontaneous work, and have drawn admiration when his other poems only succeeded in drawing sneers or other more vigorous tokens of hostility. One of the first reviewers of Wessex Poems went so far as to express a belief that Hardy could possibly do a great historical romance on the Napoleonic wars.
Leipzig, the tale of the taking of the city by the Allies in 1813, told by "old Norbert with the flat blue cap" on an evening in the master-tradesman's parlor at the Old Ship Tun at Casterbridge, is remarkable for its dramatic handling of the event that was to form the bulk of Act III of the third part of The Dynasts; for its swiftness of movement and vividness of expression that anticipated much of the vigor of execution so notably characteristic of the later poems, and for its iterated emphasis on the poet's disillusioned view of warfare:
Who met the dawn hopefully,
And were lotted their shares in a quarrel not theirs,
Dropt then in their agony.
San Sebastian, again a dramatic monologue, stresses the sordid and horrid aspects of war—it is a tale of the undying remorse that clings to the spirit of a man who has committed outrages such as always accompany the taking and plundering of towns when the soldiery are released from control. The Peasant's Confession, likewise a tale of remorse, takes us to the field of Waterloo, and explains the failure of Grouchy to arrive on the field in time by the fact that Napoleon's messenger was be-
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