by Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928)
The battle
Language: English
They come beset by riddling hail; They sway like sedges in a gale; They fail and win and win and fail; Their mad assailants rave and reel And face as men who scorn to feel. Phantasmal fears And the flop of the flame, And the throb of the clock, And the loosened slate, And the blind night's drone Which tiredly the spatial pines intone. They come beset by riddling hail; They sway like sedges in a gale; They fail and win and win and fail; Their mad assailants rave and reel And face as men who scorn to feel. Till faintness follows closing in When, faltering headlong down, they spin. Pale Colonels, Captains, ranksmen lie, Facing the earth or facing the sky. They strove to live, They stretch to die! Friends, foemen mingle; heap and heap Hide their hacked bones, earth deep! Where harmless worms caress and creep Hide their hacked bones, earth deep. What man can grieve What woman weep Better than waking is to sleep.
Authorship:
- by Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928), appears in The Dynasts, first published 1903-8 [author's text not yet checked against a primary source]
Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):
- by Garth Baxter (b. 1946), "The battle" [satb chorus and piano], from The Battle Cry, no. 2. [text verified 1 time]
Researcher for this page: Garth Baxter
This text was added to the website between May 1995 and September 2003.
Line count: 29
Word count: 167