Study Circle

A Note on Thomas Hardy’s “ In Time of ‘the Breaking of Nations’ ”

The central theme of the poem is the dialectic between creation and
destruction. There are two ideas in the poem which relate to this theme:
one, the idea of alternating cycle of creation and destruction; another, the
notion of concurrence of destruction and creation. Besides, there are
biblical allusions in the poem. The allusions help us understand the central
theme better.

The title of the poem alludes to a passage from the Old Testament.
According to the passage, the angry God told Jeremiah that he would be His
weapon to “break in pieces the nations” (Jeremiah 51:20). Jeremiah is one of
the major prophets of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament). God wanted to
punish the people of Judah for their disobedience. He let the Babylonian
army conquer the Kingdom of Judah. Jeremiah was selected by God to
explain to men the reason for the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah. The
passage tells us that God wanted to destroy the Kingdom of Judah only to
rebuild it anew.

Hardy wrote the poem in 1915, during the First World War*(1914-
1918), a series of military conflicts centring on Europe. The War threatened
to destroy Europe completely. We can assume that the speaker of the poem
is a modern Jeremiah, who tries to explain the cause of such destruction.
Perhaps he sees the War as wrath of God who wants to punish the people of
Europe for their sin. God would cause the destruction of European
civilisation only to reconstruct it afresh. In this way, the alternating cycle of
creation and destruction goes on.

A similar idea surfaces in the biblical story of Noah’s Ark. According to

the Book of Genesis (Chapter 6-9), God selected Noah, the most righteous
man, and ordered him to build a vessel. He told Noah that He would send
flood to the world, into which everything would be immersed. Noah was
ordered to take his family and a male-female pair of every kind of creature
onto the vessel or the Ark. When God sent flood, Noah did what He had
ordered him. As God had told, the Ark saved Noah, his family and the
creatures which he took with him. When the land was dry again, God carried
on the act of creation with Noah and his companions. God also explained to
Noah the reason for such destruction. He told Noah that He destroyed the
world in order to cleanse it.

The picture of the burning “couch-grass” in the second stanza of the

poem might be related to the story of Noah’s Ark. To grow a plant, one has
to remove the couch-grass that grows around it and hinders its growth.
Similarly, God preserved the most righteous man, Noah, and destroyed
sinful human beings. Whenever He thinks it necessary, God destroys His
world to reconstruct it. “Though Dynasties pass”, this cycle of creation and
destruction “will go onward the same”. As Geoffrey Chaucer said: “Time and
tide wait for no man”, this cycle never stops for
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*The War involved most of the world’s greatest powers, which assembled in two groups: the Triple
Entante (France, British Empire and Russian Empire) and the Central Powers (German Empire, Austro-
Hungarian Empire and Ottoman Empire). The War resulted in the defeat of the Central Powers.

anything. Creation is followed by destruction and vice-versa.

Another idea that relates to the dialectic of creation and destruction

is of concurrence of destruction and creation. The poem tells us that
destruction and creation occur at the same time. If there is war at one
place, there is peace at another. If some people are at war, others are in
peace. In The Life of Thomas Hardy, Hardy confesses that the thought to
write “In Time of ‘the Breaking of Nations’ ” came to his mind when he saw
an agricultural scene in Cornwall in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian
war*(1870-1871). This information is significant.
The opening stanza of the poem perhaps shows a man drawing a harrow
over the land. The man harrowing clods with the burning of couch-grass (in
the second stanza) might represent the constructive activities performed in
time of the breaking of nations. Although “Dynasties pass”, these activities
will go “onward the same”. That is to say, war and peace, construction and
destruction will go on side by side.

However, we must note that the man of the first stanza is alone,
walks slowly and that his horse “stumbles and nods”. Being “Half asleep”
they walk stiffly. They seem to be tired and in pain. We can conjecture, the
man and his horse are symbolic of the half-ruined Europe. The First World
War is preying on European civilisation. Alienation and loss of life, vigour
and happiness are results of the War. The lonely, tired man and the injured
horse might represent the victims of warfare. It can be argued that the
“heaps of couch-grass” in the second stanza symbolises the innocent,
common people who die in war. The heaps of their corpses can only produce
a “thin smoke without flame”. Neither their lives nor their deaths have any
value to those in power. Kings, emperors, dictators, ministers fight for
wealth, for more power. Yet, they stay away from the battlefield. The
innocent people, the young soldiers get killed in the battle. For the sake of
the growth of the precious plants –that is, the kings and emperors –the
couch-grass or the commoners and soldiers has to be burnt. This burning
will “go onward the same/ Though Dynasties pass”. In this way the poem
focuses on the aftermath of war.

However, the poem ends with hope. In the last stanza, the speaker
talks about a maid and her man. Perhaps they are lovers and whisper to
each other the words of love. The speaker prophesies that the story of the
lovers will outlive the annals of war. What he wants to say is that, ultimately
love will win over war. This win is a victory of construction over destruction.
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Optimism of the speaker seems to overcome his fear of the catastrophic
First World War in the end of the poem.

*The Franco-Prussian War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of
Prussia.