Channel Firing
  
That night your great guns,unawares,  
Shook all our ciffins as we lay,  
And broke the channel window-squares,  
We thought it was the Judgment-day  
  
And sat upright. While drearisome  
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:  
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,  
The worms drew back into the mounds,  
  
The glebe cow drooled. Till God called,"No;  
It's gunnery practice out at sea  
Just as before you went below;  
The world is as it used to be:  
  
"All nations striving strong to make  
Red war yet redder Mad as hatters  
They do no more for Christes sake  
Than you who are helpless in such matters.  
  
"That this is not the judgment-hour  
For some for them's a blessed thing,  
For if it were, they'd have to scour  
Hell's floor for so much threatening....  
  
"Ha,ha. It will be warmer when  
I blow the trumpet if indeed  
I ever do; for you are men,  
And rest eternal sorely need."  
  
So down we lay again. "I wonder,  
Will the world ever saner be,"  
Said one, "than when He sent us under  
In our indifferent century!"  
  
And many a skeleton shook his head.  
"Instead of preaching forty year,"  
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,  
"I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer."  
  
Again the guns disturbed the hour,  
Roaring their readiness to avenge,  
As far inland as Stourton Tover,  
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge."  
  
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)