The Double Voice in Thomas Hardy's "Men Who March Away (Song of The Soldiers)"
Abstract
"Men Who March Away (Song of the Soldiers)" was written by Thomas Hardy, a poet who had never experienced the war first-hand. Alongside other famous authors of the age, he was asked by the British Government to contribute to the work of the War Propaganda Bureau by writing patriotic poems celebrating the British soldier, and at a meeting held in Wellington House in London, Hardy along with other British poets became attached to the British propaganda. “Men Who March Away (Song of the Soldiers)” was published on 9th September, just a week after the authors’ meeting at Wellington House. The poem that has two titles which are “Men Who March Away” and “Song of the Soldiers” and two intentions, presents us with the perspective of a soldier and an onlooker simultaneously. If one reads the speaker as a soldier, the writing becomes a manipulative propagandist poem; by contrast, understanding the speaker as an onlooker changes the style and reproduces the poem as an example of anti-war writing. In this article, I will apply Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of “double voiced discourse” to highlight the simultaneously contrasting messages of the poem.
Keywords
The First World War,War Poetry,Propaganda,Protest,Thomas Hardy
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