LiederNet logo

CONTENTS

×
  • Home | Introduction
  • Composers (20,195)
  • Text Authors (19,677)
  • Go to a Random Text
  • What’s New
  • A Small Tour
  • FAQ & Links
  • Donors
  • DONATE

UTILITIES

  • Search Everything
  • Search by Surname
  • Search by Title or First Line
  • Search by Year
  • Search by Collection

CREDITS

  • Emily Ezust
  • Contributors (1,115)
  • Contact Information
  • Bibliography

  • Copyright Statement
  • Privacy Policy

Follow us on Facebook

by Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928)

South of the Line, inland from far...
Language: English 
South of the Line, [inland]1 from far Durban,
A mouldering soldier lies - your countryman.
Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,
And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans
Nightly to clear Canopus: "I would know
By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law 
Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified,
Was ruled to be inept, and set aside?
And what of logic or of truth appears
In tacking "Anno domini" to the years?
Near twenty-hundred liveried thus have hied,
But tarries yet the Cause for which He died."

Available sung texts:   ← What is this?

•   J. Joubert 

About the headline (FAQ)

View original text (without footnotes)
1 omitted by Joubert.

Text Authorship:

  • by Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928), first published 1899 [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

  • by Garth Baxter (b. 1946), "Coda (A Christmas Ghost-Story)" [ satb chorus and piano ], from The Battle Cry, no. 6 [sung text checked 1 time]
  • by John Pierre Herman Joubert (1927 - 2019), "A Christmas Ghost-Story", op. 109 no. 5 (1985), from South of the Line, no. 5 [sung text checked 1 time]

Researcher for this page: Garth Baxter

This text was added to the website between May 1995 and September 2003.
Line count: 12
Word count: 91

Gentle Reminder

This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
–Emily Ezust, Founder

Donate

We use cookies for internal analytics and to earn much-needed advertising revenue. (Did you know you can help support us by turning off ad-blockers?) To learn more, see our Privacy Policy. To learn how to opt out of cookies, please visit this site.

I acknowledge the use of cookies

Contact
Copyright
Privacy

Copyright © 2025 The LiederNet Archive

Site redesign by Shawn Thuris