Both the Boer and the First World War affected Thomas Hardy, just as it had influenced numerous others of his contemporaries, giving life to the modernism literature style that focused on reassessing previous truths. According to Marroni, Hardy’s work has a “prevailing sense of loss and displacement, often interwoven with threads of pessimism culminating in despair,” entirely characteristic of the style. The tone of Hardy’s war poems allows the reader to feel the emotional condition of the common man, confused by the inhumane killing, and finding no solace in religion, and putting no trust in authority.
Optimism is rare in Hardy’s work and, when it occurs, it is a careful type of happiness, with the greater focus being on the catastrophe of war. His hopeful tone shows in his poem In Time of the Breaking of Nations, where he anticipates forgetting wartime as “War’s annals will cloud into night / Ere their story die.” With his use of grammar, Hardy portrays the speech of the common people, making the reader empathize with his heroes, with an apt example being “he thought he’d ‘list, perhaps.” The carnage and its effect on society lead to disillusionment with religion, supported by the crudeness of God, who laughs at the eagerness of dead men for judgment day. With Hardy’s work portraying Godin an almost evil role and with men dissociated from their physical qualities through a focus on their mental state, Hardy’s work seems fitting to the modernist style.