Reading the daily news can provoke anxiety in even the sturdiest soul. The proverbial “if it bleeds, it leads” maxim has long guided media coverage but in our wired and polarized world this principle seems more pervasive than ever. It makes sense, biologically and sociologically, that we come of age hard-wired to scan the horizon for trouble, but at what cost to our emotional and spiritual well-being? What kind of people do we become when we fail to adopt the long view and conclude that the bad in the world outweighs the good? Ironically, the somewhat curmudgeonly poet Thomas Hardy offered a profound solution to this complex dilemma more than 100 years ago in his poem entitled “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations.’” Just as Hardy reminds us that seedtime, harvest, and love will outlive war, my attempts to focus on good and simple things that endure help me to maintain perspective in a world that can seem out of control.
I
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
Published in 1916 during the height of World War I, Hardy’s deceptively quiet poem is resoundingly powerful when viewed as a tiny light amidst great darkness. In this opening stanza, he reminds us that cyclical life-giving acts of creation, even truly simple ones like this one, offer significant counterpoints to the violence and destruction of war. The man and his old horse are preparing the ground for planting, and though their movements are slow, silent, and sleepy, their symbiotic work represents an activity as vital as civilization itself.
Fast forward to 2024. According to data collected by the Imperial War Museum, wars have been waged somewhere on the planet in nearly every year between 1918 and today; approximately 200 million people have died in these wars and that number is likely conservative. How can ploughing and planting compete with devastation on that scale?
Hardy, no simpleton, understood that swords (guns, artillery, cannons, tanks, nuclear warheads . . .) far outnumber ploughshares; and, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he knew that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. Instead of inviting us to ignore the darkness, he reminds us in this tiny poem to foreground the good. Intentionally peppering these 12 lines with words often associated with war—clods, stalk, smoke, heaps, cloud, night—Hardy asks us to look for the light within the darkness: to watch the farmers at work, to celebrate the young couple in love, to remember the goodness happening at the very same time.
Still recovering from a week-old cold virus, this past Saturday I decided to walk instead of run during my early morning workout. I made a wide circuit in the neighborhoods surrounding STLCC Meramec and then lingered for several minutes in the display gardens, watching the bees and butterflies flit among the native and ornamental plants. I know the names of so few of these flowers, but I recognize beauty when I see it and these lush and colorful flower beds are exquisite. “We must cultivate our garden,” Candide concludes at the end of Voltaire’s dark tale of a world gone wrong. When I walk through the Meramec woodlands, when I visit the Missouri Botanical Garden, when I notice the chrysanthemums adorning my neighbors’ front porches, and when I read about the latest crop protecting research unfolding at the Danforth Plant and Science Center, I am carrying out Hardy’s and Voltaire’s chief recommendations for hanging onto our collective humanity: finding the light and cultivating our gardens.
II
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
In Hardy’s second vignette, he offers us an image of crop control and harvesting. Thin smoke is involved, but unlike the fires of war, this is managed fire, life-giving fire. Once again, he opens the stanza with the adverb “only,” reminding us that this activity is also quiet and overlooked, perhaps barely perceptible. Where war involves spectacle, noise, and destruction, this flame-less smoke is gentle, life-sustaining.
I’m teaching a Senior Honors Seminar this semester entitled “Skies, Trees, Meadows: Literature of the Outdoors.” Yesterday we spent a few minutes writing about outdoor sanctuaries we remember from before the age of 10. In the late 1970s when I was almost nine, my family lived for 18 months in a brand-new, still-under-construction subdivision off busy Centre Street in Portage, Michigan. “Stagecoach Trails,” as it was anachronistically named, contained two roads (Frontier and Conestoga Avenues) and 12-15 brand-new ranch-style homes, with several more on the way. My playmates and I loved the enormous “sandboxes” created by all the freshly dug foundations, but my favorite spot—and the one I wrote about yesterday—was the green pond tucked in the scrub brush at the end of a gravel road extending a ¼ mile past the last fully finished house. I loved everything about this place: the pea-soup color, the viscous thickness of the water, the croaking bullfrogs, the delicate blue-winged dragon flies. As sod lawns were being trucked in and asphalt poured, I spent free afternoons and weekends playing near this tiny remnant of wilderness: a sanctuary that most of the adults in the neighborhood likely did not know existed.
III
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
In this final vignette, Hardy spotlights a young couple in love. Their story—the story of courtship, romance, marriage, family, children, community—is, indeed, more lasting than war’s.
In the Genesis story, God creates human beings in his image and calls his creation “very good.” And while it is those same human beings (us) who unleash war and destruction, no sane person can hold an infant and not be moved by the miracle—the inherent goodness—of human existence. St. Paul tells us to focus on whatsoever is good, true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable. He wrote these words while standing in waist-deep muck, having been imprisoned for his religious beliefs. When I despair about our world (the endless wars, the climate crisis, the mass shootings, the violent rhetoric, the destruction of natural beauty) and about myself (my pride, unkindness, impatience, selfishness), I want to remember these scenes from Hardy and think about the resilience, creativity, and compassion that we are capable of as well. It’s a perspective shift worth making.
