Drummer Hodge Summary & Analysis
by Thomas Hardy

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"Drummer Hodge" is an elegy for a young British casualty of the Second Boer War (1899-1902). First published as "The Dead Drummer" in 1899, the year the war broke out, it appeared under its better-known title in Thomas Hardy's Poems of the Past and the Present (1901). The poem depicts Hodge's brisk, unceremonious burial in a country whose terrain and sky were totally foreign to him. With stark irony, it illustrates the senseless cruelty of war, including imperial wars that send confused young people to die in faraway countries.

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