ABSTRACT
Thomas Hardy's striking Boer War poem, 'The Souls of the Slain', suggests a number of possible readings, formalist, historical and philosophical, which complement and contradict each other in their framings of this dissonant text. Hardy's poem appears subconsciously to reflect one of the most disturbing features of the Boer War for late-Victorian England – the fact that an imperial conflict was being fought out between opposed groups of white men – 'striving Teutons, Slavs and Gaels', as Hardy designated the warring factions in his poem 'Departure'. It may be suggested that the resolution of the 'trooped apparitions' into two parties mirrors an ideological fracture of the period, as defined in van Wyk Smith's scholarly appraisal of Boer War poetry: the Boer War became a battlefield not only of opposing armies, but also of conflicting ideas on empire.
