Drummer Hodge — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
Drummer Hodge
The poems
What you need to know
A young drummer from rural England killed in South Africa and buried without a coffin under strange stars, who becomes part of a land he never understood.
How the Boer War and Hardy's view of ordinary soldiers shape the poem, and how its regular stanzas, rhyme and Afrikaans words work.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest / Uncoffined — just as found', 'His landmark is a kopje-crest', 'foreign constellations west', 'Young Hodge the drummer never knew', 'Fresh from his Wessex home', 'The meaning of the broad Karoo', 'Strange stars amid the gloam', 'Yet portion of that unknown plain / Will Hodge for ever be', 'His homely Northern breast and brain / Grow up some Southern tree', 'And strange-eyed constellations reign / His stars eternally'.
Form: three six-line stanzas rhyming ABABAB; the careless verb that opens it, Afrikaans words for the landscape, and the contrast of North and South, home and a foreign land, ending in some comfort as he becomes part of it.
Context: the Second Boer War of 1899 to 1902 between Britain and the Boer republics of South Africa; Hardy's war poems told from the viewpoint of ordinary soldiers; Wessex, his name for the south-west of England.
Compares well with: Disabled and Remains on young soldiers and what war does to them; Kamikaze on war and dying; I Shall Return on home and a land far away.
