Point of View

“Drummer Hodge” is in a third-person omniscient point of view through an unnamed speaker. The speaker’s omniscience is evident from how he seems to know more about the specific circumstances of Hodge’s death than anyone else. While the other characters in the poem, “They” and “Drummer Hodge,” exist in various states of not knowing – for example, not knowing Hodge’s identity despite his sacrifice and not knowing the far-reaching causes of one’s own death, respectively – the third person provides to us, the readers, many specific details (1). From the speaker, we learn what the anonymous “They” doesn’t know – that Hodge is “Fresh from his Wessex home” and that, though his burial is unassociated with any intentional man-made markers, there does exist elements of the South African setting that become the naturally occurring markers of Hodge’s death (8). Therefore, the third-person speaker, in...