That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment Day.

These lines are spoken by the dead in Hardy’s poem “Channel Firing,” written in the early years of the 20th century amid intensifying naval militarization. The poem imagines a night of gunnery practice in the English Channel so violent that it jolts the sleepers in their graves, rattling coffins and breaking church windows. Hardy frames the scene as a grimly comic apocalypse: the dead momentarily believe the Last Judgment has arrived, only to learn it is merely routine military “practice.” The setting—churchyard coffins beneath a chancel—anchors the modern sound of artillery in an old, sacred landscape, sharpening the shock of the intrusion.

Hardy uses the dead’s startled voice to expose how normalized large-scale violence has become: what feels like the end of the world is, in fact, ordinary preparation for war. The image of “great guns” shaking coffins and shattering chancel windows suggests modern technology’s power to disturb even the most stable human institutions—death, religion, and communal memory. By having the dead mistake the barrage for Judgment Day, Hardy ironizes both religious expectation and patriotic militarism: humanity can summon apocalyptic force without any moral reckoning to match it. The stanza’s tight rhyme and plain diction intensify the eerie blend of humor and dread.