Hardy’s poetry celebrates the durability of commonplace forms of human love, from community values and friendly customs to familial affection. Numerous poems celebrate the ways in which life’s ordinary pleasures, such as music, dance, laughter, and alcohol can cheer and enliven human interactions. In “Great Things” (1917), for example, Hardy’s speaker optimistically extolls his love for cider, dance, and love, the act of dancing being analogous to both the heady effects of alcohol and the thrill of romance. Here he proclaims that, when death comes, regardless of the possible existence of an afterlife or no, these shared human pleasures such as drinking and dancing will still have been great things for him. Hardy’s poetic representation of these simple but significant pleasures, moreover, highlights them as universal, indicating that such things will continue to be shared by successive generations of ordinary groups of people. In “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’” (1917), for example, Hardy affirms that such ordinary ways of life will endure. My discussion of this group of poems will also illustrate the important influence of sources such as Lucretius, Horace, A. E. Housman, William Barnes, John Addington Symonds, and Edward Clodd.