From the little-known poem “The Rejected Member’s Wife” to the widely anthologized Christmas poem “The Oxen,” the Sun has presented several works by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) in its Poem of the Day feature. Today we add another anthology poem, one of the A-Side hits of Hardy’s catalogue. And why not? Hardy’s large corpus is an inexhaustible well of formal verse from which to draw. And “Channel Firing” shows Hardy in several of his modes: comic, apocalyptic, compiling a catalogue of human types, and displaying a wry sense of English history.

The poem also shows the poet’s steady technical skill at rhyme and meter. In nine stanzas of tetrameter quatrains, rhymed abab, Hardy imagines that British navy, with its gunnery practice in the English Channel, has awakened the dead, sleeping in their churchyard graves: “That night your great guns, unawares, / Shook all our coffins as we lay, . . . / We thought it was the Judgment-day.”

Published just months before the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the poem notes the rise of modern war: “All nations striving strong to make / Red war yet redder.” And it gently mocks the village type of Parson Thirdly (so called, presumably, because his overlong sermons included the dread word “thirdly” as they turned to yet another topic). But then the naval guns roar again, and their sound rolls back into ancient England, “As far inland as Stourton Tower, / And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.”