Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch grass:
Yet this will go onward the same
Though dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by;
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

These lines are from Thomas Hardy’s poem “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’,” written in response to the Boer War era and first published in 1915 during the First World War. Hardy frames the vastness and destructiveness of war against a quiet rural scene: a ploughman turning heavy soil with an old horse, smoke rising from burned couch grass, and a young couple passing by. The poem’s situation is deliberately ordinary and local—Hardy’s Wessex countryside—so that the reader feels how daily labor and private affection persist while political “dynasties” and military chronicles fade. The contrast is central to Hardy’s late-war poetry.

Hardy contrasts the apparent insignificance of rural labor and small human intimacies with the grand narratives of power and war. The ploughman’s “slow silent walk,” the sleepy horse, and the “thin smoke without flame” evoke a muted, cyclical countryside whose continuities outlast political upheavals—“though dynasties pass.” The poem then shifts to a young couple, suggesting that private lives and local affections possess a durability that official history lacks: “War’s annals will cloud into night / Ere their story die.” The passage embodies Hardy’s characteristic skepticism toward historical “greatness” and his sympathy for ordinary existence as the true, enduring substance of time.