Analysis Of Thomas Hardy’s And There Was A Great Calm
In Thomas Hardy’s “And There Was a Great Calm”, Hardy writes that war is futile, the only thing war causes is suffering for all and many times the reason the war began is forgotten because the conflict last so long. The claim made by Hardy is true because humans often go in war over pointless things and they last so long to a point where the reason for the entire conflict is forgotten. Hardy begins his poem with words such as “anger”, “despair” and “sorrow” which highlights the suffering and losses caused by war. The connotations of these words, makes the reader understand the often hidden and grueling perspective of war. But most importantly, he ends the first stanza and the last stanza with the question “why?”. This simple questions makes the reader question the entire purpose of the war and whether all this suffering was worth it. In the last line of stanza six, Hardy writes “strange, this! How? All firing stopped?”. The line highlights the disbelief expressed by the people as they never expected the war to end. In Descartes’ Error, Antonio Damasio states that “the comprehensive understanding of the human mind requires an organismic perspective; that not only must the mind move from a nonphysical cogitum to the realm of biological tissue, but it must also be related to a whole organism possessed of integrated body proper and brain and fully interactive with a physical and social environment”.
The poem of Thomas Hardy really encapsulates this as the poem goes through the perspective of all of the people affected by war.In the last stanza Thomas Hardy writes of “peace on earth, and silence in the sky: some could and some couldn’t, shake off the misery.” when war ends, Thomas Hardy is saying that although the war is over, the soldiers that fought in the battle basically relive it over and over again because of all the pain and suffering that they went through. Thomas Hardy agrees that humans are fools and war is futile in his poem “and there was a great calm” What was the point of going to war in the first place, to lose valuable human lives and scar the rest that lived through it all? As Hardy sees it, the war is physically over for people but the people that fought in it have it embedded deep inside of them. Bringing it back to stanza six’s last line, the soldiers murmuring strange, all the firing stopped, tells us that they knew nothing but gunfire and shells getting fired.
Their reason to fight in this war was forgotten because of their day to day lives of killing more and more victims of the war who have also forgotten their sole purpose to fight. All good will vanished from the battlefields and the warzones with “hell” and “shell” shouted every day. Would there ever be “peace” and “silence” in this world with the selfish in charge and victims who stain their hands with blood of those who had also chose to participate in the war? Every person that goes to war will get scarred for life as Thomas Hardy proclaims. In stanza three he writes “To daydreaming men in millions when they mused, to men with nightmares in millions while they slept”. These men at war know nothing but gunfire now that they’re this deep.
Any person going to war for no reason except someone drafting them would lose their purpose eventually and become a different person. Being a fool doesn't necessarily have to have a bad connotation to it, but a rather sad one. Hardy is trying to say that every man going to war would be dreaming while they were supposed to be fighting, but once dusk falls, the men are having dreams about their fellow companions dying or they themselves are dying in their sleep.
