Channel Firing Summary & Analysis
by Thomas Hardy

Question about this poem?
Have a question about this poem?
Have a specific question about this poem?
Have a specific question about this poem?
Have a specific question about this poem?
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
Ask us
Ask us
Ask a question
Ask a question
Ask a question

The Full Text of “Channel Firing”

1That night your great guns, unawares,

2Shook all our coffins as we lay,

3And broke the chancel window-squares,

4We thought it was the Judgment-day

5And sat upright. While drearisome

6Arose the howl of wakened hounds:

7The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

8The worms drew back into the mounds,

9The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No;

10It’s gunnery practice out at sea

11Just as before you went below;

12The world is as it used to be:

13“All nations striving strong to make

14Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters

15They do no more for Christés sake

16Than you who are helpless in such matters.

17“That this is not the judgment-hour

18For some of them’s a blessed thing,

19For if it were they’d have to scour

20Hell’s floor for so much threatening....

21“Ha, ha. It will be warmer when

22I blow the trumpet (if indeed

23I ever do; for you are men,

24And rest eternal sorely need).”

25So down we lay again. “I wonder,

26Will the world ever saner be,”

27Said one, “than when He sent us under

28In our indifferent century!”

29And many a skeleton shook his head.

30“Instead of preaching forty year,”

31My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,

32“I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”

33Again the guns disturbed the hour,

34Roaring their readiness to avenge,

35As far inland as Stourton Tower,

36And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

  • “Channel Firing” Introduction

    • 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. They think it is Judgement Day (i.e., the Apocalypse), but God reassures them that it's just business as usual here on Earth. In this bleakly satirical back-and-forth between God and the dead, the poem presents a pessimistic view of human history and modern war.

  • “Channel Firing” Summary

    • One night, you were firing powerful cannons, which, not realizing they were so loud, caused our coffins to vibrate. The vibration also caused the windows behind the altar in the church to break. We woke up, thinking it was the apocalypse.

      So we sat up. Meanwhile, the dogs that had been startled awake started howling mournfully. A mouse in the church was frightened and dropped a crumb it had picked up at the altar. Worms slithered back into the dirt.

      The parish cow drooled. Then God told us, "It's not the apocalypse. They're just practicing firing their cannons out on the ocean. Things are the same as when you were alive. The world hasn't changed its attitude towards war.

      "Countries are still trying to make war—which was already devastating—even bloodier and deadlier. Crazy leaders do nothing to promote Christian ideals of peace. Despite having power, they do as little as you common dead people, who are totally powerless.

      "In fact, it's a good thing for national leaders that it's not the apocalypse. If it were, I'd have to send them to Hell, where they'd be doomed to clean the floor—all for the disturbances they've caused on Earth.

      "Hahaha. Things will get hotter on Earth when I do sound the trumpet of Judgment Day—that is, if I ever sound the trumpet. I know you humans could surely use eternal rest, after all you've been through."

      So we dead people lay down again. "I wonder if the world will ever be less crazy," one of us said, "than it was when God sent us to our deaths in the cruel century we lived in."

      Many skeletons shook their heads in sadness. "Instead of being a priest for forty years," said the man buried next to me, Parson Thirdly, "I wish I'd just smoked and drank."

      Once again the night was filled with the sounds of the guns, which seemed to announce that they were ready to get revenge. Their sound reached far beyond the coast into the mainland—to the war memorial Stourton Tower; to the mythical Camelot; and to the ancient stone structure Stonehenge, with the stars above it.

  • “Channel Firing” Themes

    • Theme The Senselessness and Futility of War

      The Senselessness and Futility of War

      “Channel Firing” is a bleak, satirical critique of war and particularly of arms races—the rush for nations to build increasingly devastating weapons of war. In the poem, the advancement of modern technology has simply allowed countries to “make / Red war yet redder” (i.e., to make warfare bloodier) at a much faster rate. The speaker doesn’t look on these advances with patriotic pride, nor as forces with any potential to make the world a better place. Instead, the speaker sees countries as making the same mistakes they’ve made throughout history. War is utterly misguided “madness,” the poem argues, that can do no more to improve the world than can the dead in their coffins.

      The first line of the poem says it all: “That night your great guns, unawares.” The phrase “great guns” suggests the mightiness of the military weapons, which are so powerful that they shake the dead wake. The dead sit up in their coffins thinking it’s “Judgment-day”—when God will determine who goes to Heaven—but it’s actually just “gunnery practice.” God’s dismissal of the guns implies that, for all their bluster and noise, they have nothing to do with what’s right and wrong. In fact, God says that it’s a good thing it isn’t “Judgment hour”—because if it were, a lot of the people firing those guns would be sent to Hell.

      Furthermore, the personification of “great guns” as “unawares” treats the guns as beings that aren’t conscious of what they’re doing. The guns are just another tool of senseless war, where there’s no guarantee that they will be used for good. The word “unawares” also implies that those firing these guns don’t understand the reach their actions will have, which, in turn, underscores how foolish these weapons are in the first place. That is, humanity has created greater and greater weapons of destruction without fully grasping the consequences.

      It’s almost as if countries and militaries are possessed by a kind of madness. This isn’t a temporary madness, either, but rather is presented as a longstanding historical fact. God describes national leaders as “Mad as hatters.” This is because they continue making war rather than working for a better world. And although technology has grown more powerful, this madness has been around for humanity’s entire history. “The world is as it used to be,” says God—meaning that the firing guns are just part of society chugging along as it always has.

      Developing this idea, the poem takes a wide view of human history in its second half. The poem looks both to humanity’s future and distant past in order to emphasize how pervasive war has been throughout the ages. One of the dead people woken by the gunfire wonders if “the world” will ever be “saner”—less driven to the madness of war—than it was when this person died in an entirely different “century.” The poem thus implies that humanity has always been irrational and self-destructive. And judging by this gunnery practice, there’s little hope for the future.

      The last two lines suggest how embedded war is in humanity’s history. The sound of the guns extends “As far inland as Stourton Tower, / And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.” Stourton Tower was built in the 1700s, Camelot was the mythical capital of King Arthur’s court in the Middle Ages, and Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument. That is, the sound of war pervades not just space, but also history. Each of these place, real or fictional, represent distinct elements of English history. Yet instead of feeling pride in such history—the kind of pride that soldiers and military leaders feel—the speaker can only hear the terrible guns that “disturbed the hour.”

      Thus, the poem looks further and further back in time, hearing the guns’ “readiness to avenge” echoing through all these time periods. Human history is suffused with the madness of war, and that madness won’t end anytime soon.

    • Theme Religious Doubt

      Religious Doubt

      The poem’s satirical depiction of God suggests that the speaker has a complicated relationship with religion. Although the speaker uses God as an interlocutor (i.e., a second speaker) to help make sense of the human world, the speaker also holds God at a distance, depicting him ironically. Perhaps God is nothing more than a helpful fiction, the poem suggests, one that people can use to help make sense of life. Or, perhaps the speaker is trying to make sense of how God could create such a violent world. However one interprets the poem, it’s clear the speaker casts doubt on the promises of religion. How can a society call itself Christian, the poem implicitly asks, while also developing weapons that lead to such horror and destruction?

      The poem’s satirical, skeptical attitude towards God comes across in God’s quoted speech. Rather than mimicking how God sounds in, say, the King James Bible, the poem gives God a rather glib tone: “Ha, ha. It will be warmer when / I blow the trumpet.” This reference to “blow[ing] the trumpet” is an allusion to the apocalypse. By having God laugh at human suffering and the apocalypse, the poem suggests that God doesn’t take these things too seriously. He has a pretty cynical attitude towards the world he created. It also hints that God may not be as powerful as religion makes him out to be. His cynicism seems to stem from the fact that he can’t do anything to stop humans from waging war.

      Having God speak in a poem is always a bold choice. It draws attention to the artificiality of the poem—after all, God doesn’t usually speak to people in their everyday lives. In fact, the poem’s depiction of God seems to be hinting that he is a fictional entity. When God references “blow[ing] the trumpet,” he immediately follows it up with the qualification: “if indeed / I ever do.” In other words, God’s not sure that he’ll ever put an end to worldly suffering.

      This uncertainty suggests that God’s not sure what his plan for the world is. Yet it also pushes the reader to wonder if there might not be a God at all. In other words, this moment can be read as a cheeky nod to God’s own fictional nature. That is, the character called “God” in this poem acknowledges that he might not even be real. In that case, there will be no reckoning on Judgment day, and the world will continue on its violent path forever.

      All this leads to a sense that Christianity’s hopes and ethics may be futile, both on a national and an individual level. It doesn’t cause countries to stop fighting, and it doesn’t help people cope with war. In reference to national leaders, God says, “They do no more for Christés sake / Than you who are helpless in such matters.” In other words, the leaders of supposedly Christian nations do little to actually advance the morals of Christianity. In fact, if it were Judgment day, those leaders would have to “scour / Hell’s floor for so much threatening.” So much for Christianity’s ability to bring out the good in people, the poem seems to say.

      As for regular people, Parson Thirdly (a dead clergyman) puts it like this: “Instead of preaching forty year […] I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.” Even in this direct conversation with God, the Parson regrets devoting his life to religion. He wishes he’d spend his life enjoying himself instead. Either way, he’d have ended up here—lying in the ground, terrified by gunfire. Thus, the poem has a bleak outlook on the possibilities of Christianity, expressing little hope that God is real—or that, if he is, he has any power to save humanity.

    • Theme The Helplessness of Individuals

      The Helplessness of Individuals

      As the poem depicts the fright of both animals and the human dead, the poem captures the helplessness of individuals in the face of war. In contrast to wealthy nations that build “great guns,” the dead and the churchyard animals are meek, humble creatures. They live in a quaint old graveyard; technology doesn’t benefit them. Their fright reflects the fate of all individuals in the modern world, which, according to the poem at least, is to be ignored by the powerful and condemned to suffer.

      The reactions of the animals in the churchyard offer a stark contrast to the powerful “great guns” that disturb them. The speaker describes the reactions of meek and gentle animals: “The mouse let fall the altar-crumb / The worms drew back into the mounds.” These images suggest that as the powerful prepare for war, the humble suffer. Similarly, the guns also wake the dead; they “Shook all our coffins as we lay.” In a word, everyone is terrified.

      God acknowledges the unfortunate situation of the meek, putting a fine point on it: “you who are helpless in such matters.” In other words, not only do acts of war terrify ordinary people, but there’s also nothing they can do; war will go on no matter what. God goes on to say, “you are men, / And rest eternal sorely need.” The world is tiring, draining, it wears ordinary people down. However, the only thing that would give people rest is if God brought about Judgment Day, ending the world as we know it. Yet—as noted in the previous theme—there seems to be little hope of him doing that. Barring such action, the helplessness of individuals may be a permanent plight.

      So, the poem ends on a rather bleak note for individuals: with no help forthcoming from the powerful or even God, they are left to the terrible, unpredictable violence of modern war.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Channel Firing”

    • Lines 1-5

      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.

      The first sentence of "Channel Firing" spans the entire first stanza and flows into the second. It sets up the poem's main juxtaposition and its satirical tone. As warships practice firing their massive cannons out at sea, the noise travels inland to a country church. The noise is so loud that it shatters the church windows and literally wakes the dead, who sit bolt upright, thinking it is "Judgment-day"—i.e, the Apocalypse.

      This dramatic irony (the dead's misunderstanding about the noise) kicks off the poem by juxtaposing the violent reality of the world with Christian expectations. That is, whereas the Christian dead think God has finally decided to intervene in worldly affairs, in reality things are the same as always. Nations are preparing for war.

      The first line of the poem says a great deal about the world the dead wake up to: "That night your great guns, unawares." This "your" is striking. Because this poem is spoken by dead people, this "your" refers to the living. Specifically, it singles out the people who are responsible for testing these "great guns" out at sea: national and military leaders. More generally, however, it seems to rope in anyone who's reading the poem. That is, the "your" can be read as directly addressing the reader. This feeling that the poem may or may not be addressing the reader forces the reader to think about where they stand in relation to the issues the poem raises. Each person that reads the poem is forced to consider how they feel about war, technology, and religion.

      The phrase "great guns" captures how modern countries feel about technology. Advances in weaponry is seen as positive. The guns (the giant artillery cannons on warships) are "great" not only in the sense that they are powerful, but that they are supposedly glorious. Yet the speaker immediately qualifies this phrase with the word "unawares." The adjective personifies the guns, suggesting that they—like people—can be unaware of the consequences of their own actions. The guns (and by extension those who fire them) don't realize that they've awoken the dead. So, while these guns may be "great," they're also kind of like brutes who make a lot of clumsy noise.

      The first stanza establishes the form the poem will follow throughout. The first stanza is a quatrain (a four-line stanza) that follows the rhyme scheme ABAB. Metrically, every line follows iambic tetrameter, or four feet in a da-DUM rhythm. The third line exemplifies this meter well:

      And broke | the chan- | cel win- | dow-squares,

      Hardy often uses forms like this, which is a pretty traditional one and has often been associated with songs and folk stories. Such quatrains are good for capturing the speech and rhythms of everyday people—something the poem is clearly interested in, as all the dead seem to be regular country folk.

    • Lines 5-9

      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.

      LitCharts Logo

      Unlock all 313 words of this analysis of Lines 5-9 of “Channel Firing,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.

      Plus so much more...

    • Lines 9-12

      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:

    • Lines 13-16

      “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.

    • Lines 17-20

      “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....

    • Lines 21-24

      “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).”

    • Lines 25-28

      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!”

    • Lines 29-32

      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.”

    • Lines 33-36

      Again the guns disturbed the hour,
      Roaring their readiness to avenge,
      As far inland as Stourton Tower,
      And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

  • “Channel Firing” Symbols

    • Symbol Great Guns

      Great Guns

      The most prominent symbol in the poem is the "great guns," the powerful artillery canons on warships. The guns symbolize how modern technology has led to increasingly brutal and unthinking forms of war. The adjective "great" is thus ironic: although the guns are "great" in the sense of powerful, they are not "great" for humankind; they're terrible.

      The poem immediately shows why the guns aren't great. The noise alone from them is enough to shatter church windows, startle all the country animals, and wake the dead. While national leaders may argue that war is necessary, it clearly only has detrimental effects on the lives of everyday people. Even God, who has an omniscient view of the world, thinks the guns are awful, and that those who use them are "Mad as hatters."

      Although such powerful guns are made possible by modern advances in technology, at the same time they represent an age-old trend: war and the search for more powerful forms of violence. In the last stanza, the sounds of the guns goes "roaring" not only deep into England, but also deep into history, reaching even to Stonehenge, which was built several thousand years ago. In other words, "great guns" represent the violence that has pervaded human history.

    • Symbol The Trumpet

      The Trumpet

      The trumpet alludes to the seven trumpets of the apocalypse, heralding "Judgement-day," when God decides who gets into Heaven and who goes to Hell. More broadly, the trumpet in the poem symbolizes the Christian belief in God's omnipotence, or unlimited power over the world. Implicit in this belief, then, is that no human violence can come close to what God is capable of—and which humans will witness during the apocalypse.

      Of course, the poem purposefully treats this symbol ironically. It's definitively not the apocalypse in the poem, but only "gunnery practice." God himself chimes in and confirms that it's not the apocalypse. He even casts doubt on whether such a day will ever come (perhaps because he doesn't have as much power as humans think). It's easy to begin thinking, then, that if there ever is an end of the world, it won't be brought on by God, but by humans.

    • Symbol Stars

      Stars

      The poem ends on the image of "starlit Stonehenge." The stars in this image can be read as symbolizing eternity. More specifically, they capture the place of violence throughout human history. As "the guns disturbed the hour, / Roaring their readiness to avenge," the reader gets the sense that isn't a temporary phenomenon. The "hour" that the guns disturb figuratively represents all those moments throughout history when human life has been disrupted by violence. Read this way, the "disturbed [...] hour" is as permanent as the stars.

      As the sound of the guns passes over Stourton Tower (built in the 1700s) to Camelot (a city first written about in the 1100s) and finally to Stonehenge (built in 3000 to 2000 BCE), the poem seems to travel back in time. As it finally halts at the stones of Stonehenge, the stars hanging on the blackness of night seem to sketch out over a kind of void; the endlessness of time. If God can't be expected to intervene in human affairs (such as by bringing about the end of the world) then humanity is faced with a potentially infinite future. If modern technology continues to advance, and humans keep waging war, then "Red war" will continue to grow "yet redder" for all eternity.

  • “Channel Firing” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Alliteration

      Although "Channel Firing" uses alliteration throughout, the device isn't always super noticeable. Sometimes, this is because repeating sounds are spread out subtly across the whole stanza, as with "While," "wakened," and "worms," in stanza 2, or "make," "Mad," and "more" in stanza 4. Other times, sounds repeat across quieter words that don't stand out too much, such as the /th/ sound in stanza 5 (both voiced and unvoiced), in words like "That," "this" and "thing."

      There are some moments, however, where alliteration does make more of an impression, offering poetic emphasis on important images and phrases. For instance, the poem begins with alliteration on the important phrase "great guns." The /g/ alliteration draws attention to the guns, whose noise pervades the poem and is the whole reason for the conversation between God and the dead. Additionally, the alliteration adds a touch of irony. This is partly due to the artificiality of alliteration—it's not how people normally talk—signaling that there may also be something contrived about the very notion of "great guns." As the poem will go on to show, these guns are not so great; they're brute and foolish instruments of destruction.

      The /g/ sound reappears in the third stanza in "glebe cow," "God," and "gunnery." Here, the /g/ triangulates three important elements in the poem. First, the "glebe cow," a parish cow, represents the helplessness and limited knowledge of individuals. "God," of course, plays an important role in the poem, revealing himself to be disappointingly limited and cynical, not the all-powerful benevolent deity he is imagined to be. And "gunnery" again reiterates the noise of the weapons. This trio of individuals–God–guns will thematically guide the poem.

      In the last stanza, two instances of alliteration end the poem on a bleakly lyrical note. First, the /r/ sound repeats in "Roaring" and "readiness." The /r/ captures the "Roaring" sound of guns, once more returning the poem's focus to the loud guns. Then, /s/ and /t/ sounds repeat in "Stourton Tower" and "starlit Stonehenge." These sounds add some graceful musicality to the end of the poem. Whereas the middle stanzas have been ironic, lively, and bitter, this final stanza represents an abrupt change of tone. The poem grows much more serious and cosmic. The beauty of the phrase "starlit Stonehenge" has a kind of eternal mournfulness to it, as the reader considers how violence has played such a prominent role throughout human existence. The noticeable alliteration helps emphasize this.

    • Assonance

      LitCharts Logo

      Unlock all 337 words of this analysis of Assonance in “Channel Firing,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.

      Plus so much more...

    • Consonance

    • Personification

    • Aporia

    • Caesura

    • Enjambment

    • End-Stopped Line

    • Cliché

    • Irony

    • Understatement

    • Allusion

    • Repetition

    • Colloquialism

  • “Channel Firing” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Great guns
    • Chancel
    • Window-squares
    • Judgment-day
    • Hounds
    • Altar-crumb
    • Glebe cow
    • Gunnery
    • Red war
    • Mad as hatters
    • Christés sake
    • Judgment-hour
    • Scour
    • Hell's floor
    • Trumpet
    • Indifferent century
    • Forty year
    • Parson Thirdly
    • Stourton Tower
    • Camelot
    • Stonehenge
    Great guns
    • The powerful artillery cannons on warships. "Great" means big and powerful, with positive connotations that quickly turn out to be ironic.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Channel Firing”

    • Form

      "Channel Firing" is written in nine rhyming quatrains. These quatrains provide an easy-to-grasp structure for the poem—it moves forward steadily and predictably. Quatrains help the narrative of the poem move quickly and also break each section of the narrative into discrete sections.

      Quatrains are often used to tell a story, as in ballad stanzas. Although this poem doesn't strictly adhere to the structure of these stanzas, it does tell a story—or, at least, crafts a short vignette. Yet whereas ballads often tell stories of tragedy or love, this poem is distinctly satirical.

      The first two stanzas set the scene, as the noise of the "great guns" breaks the church's windows, disturbs the churchyard animals, and wakes the dead. Then, in stanzas 3 to 6, God responds to the dead, clarifying that it's not Judgment Day after all. In stanzas 7 to 8, the dead react pessimistically to what God has told them. And in the final stanza, the poem zooms out, following the noise of the guns deeper into space and time.

    • Meter

      "Channel Firing" is written in straightforward iambic tetrameter throughout, or four feet in a da-DUM rhythm per line. This is a common meter for quatrains.

      Line 3 is a good example of the poem's meter:

      And broke | the chan- | cel win- | dow-squares,

      In many such lines, the straightforward meter merely helps poem keep moving at a quick speed. Additionally, the strong, ever-present rhyme accentuates the meter. Combined with the rhyme, the meter gives the poem an almost sing-song feel. As the poem progress and reveals its satirical bite, this song-song quality comes to seem ironic. The prettiness of these formal qualities does little to mask violence of the world and God's callousness.

      Sometimes, the meter varies for emphasis. Take lines 30 and 32. Line 30 sticks to the meter:

      Instead | of prea- | ching for- | ty year,”

      while lines 32 sneaks in an extra syllable:

      I wish | I had stuck | to pipes | and beer.”

      The constant meter in line 30 captures the monotony that Parson Thirdly felt in his forty years of "preaching," whereas line 32 adds a little pep as the Parson thinks about a life of pleasure—getting drunk and smoking tobacco. This pep comes in the form of an anapest (da-da-DUM) in the second foot. Although the poem already has a sing-song feel to it, this anapest emphasizes that feeling even more, almost as if the Parson has slipped into an old drinking song.

      Thus, throughout the poem meter helps both propel the narrative and emphasize the experiences of the different characters.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      "Channel Firing" obeys a consistent rhyme scheme throughout:

      ABAB

      This is a really intuitive and common rhyme scheme to use for rhymed quatrains, and many ballads employ similar schemes. Because the poem has a kind of narrative, a scene in which different characters interact, the rhyme helps propel those interactions. It keeps the poem churning from line to the next. Rhyme also draws attention to the meter.

      Additionally, rhyme adds a kind of sing-song artificiality to the poem. As different speakers go on to describe the bleakness of world, adding to the poem's satirical and ironic edge, the rhyme stands in stark contrast to that. The consistent, snappy rhymes seem like they are trying paper over the horror of life on earth—and failing. This is of course intentional. By putting the formal prettiness of the poem at odds with its content, the poem mirrors the way that common people get lied to. They get promised "great" things by religious or national leaders, but reality turns out to be very different, much more "Mad" and "indifferent."

      The poem draws attention to rhyme by using a lot of polysyllabic rhymes (words in which more than one syllable rhymes). Often, this comes in the form of feminine rhymes, where the last syllable is unstressed. Often in poetry, when poets used feminine rhymes they make the stressed syllable rhyme as well. For example, there's "hatters" and "matters" in lines 14 and 16, and "wonder" and "under" in lines 25 and 27. There's something almost excessive about such rhymes. Not only do they tack on an extra syllable, but they also don't try to be subtle. They draw attention to the artificiality of rhyme, putting distance between the reader and the poem, leading to the reader to question these speakers and their places in the world.

      The poem ends on a very strong and unexpected rhyme: "avenge" with "Stonehenge." On their own, each of these words is already vivid, provoking many different associations in the reader's mind. Yet after reading "avenge" in line 34, very few readers would have predicted that it was going to be rhymed with "Stonehenge." On a technical level, both words rhyme on their second syllables, which is already a somewhat tricky thing to do.

      Furthermore, they accomplish one of the hardest and most important tasks of rhyme: linking totally unconnected words, which in turn leads the reader to ponder previously unimagined connections in the real world. What does Stonehenge have to do with vengeance, with violence in the name of revenge? Some people have suggested that Stonehenge was a place of healing, in which case these two rhyming words are almost opposites. Or could it, like Camelot and Stourton Tower, have been a place associated with military valor and male codes of honor? There is no answer. Rather, this final rhyme leaves the reader to ponder such questions.

  • “Channel Firing” Speaker

    • There are several speakers in "Channel Firing." The main speaker is the narrator, one of the dead people in the graveyard who are awoken by the sound of the guns. Additionally, God and two other dead people speak.

      Because the poem essentially presents a small narrative or scene, the main speaker can be thought of as a narrator. Other than the fact that this narrator is one of the dead, they remain unidentified throughout the poem. At the beginning, the narrator uses the first-person plural "we" to describe the events of the poem. As this "we," the narrator speaks for all the dead in the church's graveyard. Later in the poem, the speaker does switch to the first-person singular, referring to "My neighbour Parson Thirdly." Here, the speaker becomes a little more specific. By referring to the dead person next to the speaker as their "neighbour," the speaker gives a friendly, cozy feel to the graveyard, as if it's a tightly-knit neighborhood. The dead have the feeling of humble, everyday people.

      Meanwhile, God speaks in stanzas 3 through 6. In comparison to the dead, God knows a lot more about what's going on. His tone is cynical, ironic, and somewhat callous. He doesn't necessarily speak in the grand tone that he does in the bible. In fact, he even uses a cliché. It also seems that his powers are limited. He's not sure if there will ever been end of the world—even though he created the world! So although God is knows more about what's going on than the humble dead, he's not necessarily the all-powerful, all-knowing God that he's traditionally imagined being.

      Two dead people, besides the narrator, speak after God. The first is unidentified. This dead person wonders, "Will the world ever saner be"—if the world will ever be less insane than the "indifferent," or cruelly uncaring, century they died in. After hearing God, this person seems to have lost some faith in the fate of the world. Then, Parson Thirdly—a country priest, speaks. The Parson seems to have lost even more faith. He wonders if, instead of devoting his life to religion, he should have spent his time smoking tobacco and drinking beer.

      Each of these speakers, then, contributes to the poem's consideration of faith and the fate of the world.

  • “Channel Firing” Setting

    • "Channel Firing" is set in a country churchyard. Since the poem takes place at night, the church and churchyard are empty except for animals and the dead, who all react to the sound of the guns.

      As a novelist, Thomas Hardy set all his novels in southern England. Although this poem can't be assumed to take place in the same fictional universe as Hardy's novels, the end of the poem does suggest that it occurs in a similar region. At the end of the poem, the speaker names "Stourton Tower" and "Stonehenge," two monuments located in southern England. As the sound of the guns travels inland, in passes through these monuments. This suggests that the warships are off the south coast of England in the English Channel, the narrow body of war that separates England from France (and thus the rest of continental Europe as well). In other words, the poem happens right at the edge of England, close to the European mainland where WWI would erupt in just a few months.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “Channel Firing”

      Literary Context

      Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English poet and a novelist, known for his passionate opposition to the cruelty and hypocrisy of the buttoned-up Victorian world he was born into. Though best known now for novels like Jude the Obscure and Tess of the d'Urbervilles, during Hardy's lifetime these frank and shocking books weren't especially well-received, and he made his reputation as a poet.

      Many Victorian poets, such as Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, built on the poetry of the Romantics. Their poetry focused on lyrical beauty and psychological intensity, often retelling older narratives, such as the legends of King Arthur. Hardy's poetry, on the other hand, typically offers a bleak assessment of modern life. And where Romantic writers created passionate heroes who resisted fate and whose inner lives always colored their experience of the world, Hardy's speakers usually seem quietly baffled by fate. Like characters in a realist novel, they muddle on as the affairs of the world rage around them.
      In Hardy's poem "The Man He Killed," for example, the speaker, who was once a common foot soldier, tries to make sense of having to kill an enemy soldier that he probably could just as well have been friends with. And in "The Darkling Thrush," nature suggests a hopefulness for the future that the speaker can't quite believe; as far as the speaker can tell, humanity is on a path of self-destruction.

      The Romantics thought that nature had all the answers, if only people looked with enough sensitivity. As the modernists came along, they cast suspicion on that belief. For them, both the human world and the natural world were fragmented. After WWI especially, it seemed that all the old promises of Western civilization had been destroyed, even revealed to be lies. "Channel Firing," with its doubt in religion and patriotism as traditional pillars of authority, represents a bridge to the full-fledged modernism of a poem like "The Waste Land," written only a few years later.

      Historical Context

      Hardy wrote "Channel Firing" just months before the outbreak of World War I. Although WWI introduced a new level violence to the world, there were many bloody conflicts that paved the way for such a war. In the last stanza of the poem, the speaker references Stourton Tower, a memorial for the Seven Years War in the 1700s. Fought between England and France, and drawing in many other nations, the war cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

      During Hardy's lifetime, wars like the Crimean War and the Boer War continued to draw in powers from all over the world and kill countless people. Thus, although in this poem Hardy almost seems to predict the onset of WWI, he hardly pulls such a prediction out of thin air. Instead, the poem can be seen as tapping into the long history of humanity's increasing capabilities for violence.

      The poem also builds on the history of religious doubt in English intellectual life. Although such doubt can hardly be considered the norm, and atheists were often punished or shunned in one form or another, it was something that English writers contended with throughout the 19th century. For instance, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from Oxford in 1811 for promoting atheism. Most importantly, after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution began to undermine any hope of taking the Bible literally. The world Hardy grew up in, then, was one where religion was increasingly losing its central status in English life.

      The increasing possibilities of modern technology also inform the poem. Military technology reached a new level of advancement at the turn of the century. WWI would see the use of poison gas, airplane battles, machine guns, trench warfare, and of course the incredibly powerful artillery cannons that "Channel Firing" describes. These technologies would only continue to advance throughout the 20th century. In this way, "Channel Firing" inaugurates a new era of warfare on Earth.

  • More “Channel Firing” Resources