Channel Firing

    That night your great guns, unawares,
    Shook all our coffins as we lay,
    And broke the chancel window-squares,
    We thought it was the Judgment-day

    And sat upright. While drearisome
    Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
    The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
    The worms drew back into the mounds,

    The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, "No;
    It's gunnery practise out at sea
    Just as before you went below;
    The world is as it used to be:

    "And all nations striving strong to make
    Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
    They do no more for Christés sake
    Than you who are helpless in such matters.

    "That this is not the judgement-hour
    For some of them's a blessed thing,
    For if it were they'd have to scour
    Hell's floor for so much threatening. . . .

    "Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
    I blow the trumpet (if indeed
    I ever do; for you are men,
    And rest eternal sorely need)."

    So down we lay again. "I wonder,
    Will the world ever saner be,"
    Said one, 'than when He sent us under
    In our indifferent century!"

    And many a skeleton shook his head.
    "Instead of preaching forty year,"
    My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
    "I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer."

    Again the guns disturbed the hour,
    Roaring their readiness to avenge,
    As far inland as Stourton Tower,
    And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.


                --Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)