Religious Implications in "Channel Firing"

Peter Conrad Class of 1998
Dickinson College

"Channel Firing" by Thomas Hardy is a poem about the atrocities of war. Published shortly before the beginning of World War I, the poem seems almost prophetic. It not only decries the barbaric nature of war--an institution so vile and obnoxious that in this poem it awakens the dead--but also questions our inability to break our addiction to that institution. Less clear, however, is the answer to a question Hardy seems to be posing: is it our plight to be perpetually engaged in quests for power and vengeance, rendering us unworthy of God's call to judgment, or is it our plight that a sneering, uncaring god forsakes us in our time of need?

The religious implications of this poem are more difficult to analyze than the political and social implications because they are more subtle. Throughout the poem both God and the awakened skeletons seem to be in agreement that men are guilty of perpetuating war. Men are "striving strong to make / Red war yet redder. / Mad as hatters / They do no more for Christes sake / Than you who are helpless in such matters" (13-16). As men strive to make their nations more efficient as war machines, they do Christ no more honor than those who are already dead.

God says that "you are men, / And rest eternal sorely need" (23-24) and assures that it is a good thing for some that it is not judgement hour, "For if it were they'd have to scour / Hell's floor for so much theatening" (19-20). The skeletons wonder rhetorically "will the world ever saner be / . . . Than when He sent us under / In our indifferent century!" (26-28). The dialogue of the poem leaves little doubt that men are at fault; they exasperate God with their foolishness to the point that he threatens, "It will be warmer when / I blow the trumpet (if indeed / I ever do;)" (19-21). Mankind is obviously implicated; more subtly implicated, however, is God.

By portraying God as he does, Hardy seems to pose the question, "Why does God let us behave this way? Why, if he is indeed omnipotent, does he not put an end to this nonsense?" Hardy portrays God throughout the poem as cynical when He cracks His joke about scouring Hell's floor, as exasperated when He wonders aloud if He ever will blow the trumpet to call us to judgment day, and as bitter when He says that we do no honor unto Christ and that we need eternal rest. Never in the poem does Hardy portray God in the typical fashions used by his contemporaries: compassionate, regal, solemn, forgiving. By portraying God as he does, Hardy is questioning both a God so callous that he leaves us simply to play our games of warfare, exasperated with our violence, and a society which has driven its God to such exasperation.

Fittingly, in the last stanza of the poem the guns continue to disturb the hour; nothing is resolved. Just as Hardy's questions about warfare and the role of God and mankind are unlikely to be resolved, neither is warfare and our constant readiness to engage in it likely to disappear.