Thomas Hardy's Poetic Curse

British Poster from the Interwar Period

I was recently reading some of Thomas Hardy's war poems, which tend to be pretty pessimistic. The selection I found most memorable, though, was this curse against the warmakers from "Moments of Vision."

Then seemed a Heart crying: 'Whosoever they be 

At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame 

Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we, 

'Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame; 

May their familiars grow to shun their name, 

And their brood perish everlastingly'. 

April 1915