no./Zfi

AN ANALYSIS OF TIME

IN THE POETRY OF

THOMAS HARDY

John F. .Noonan

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

August 1969

Approved by Doctoral Committ

\dvi s Department of English

EEN STATE UNIVERSITY U3BARY 31^^71 II 428619

ABSTRACT

The presence of gloom in the poetry of Thomas Hardy has been noted by critics since the appearance of his earliest volumes. His occasional buoyancy has also been verified in critical studies. This dissertation has explored this range of responses to life in Hardy’s poetry using his treatment of time as the central reference.

In those poems that take a dim view of reality, time is often seen as the villain. It is the invisible force which separates men from the joys of childhood and the boundless aspirations of youth, and it is nearly always part of the reason why the present is painful. A regular cycle can be observed: men move in time from faith and felicity to skepticism and sadness. The future, too, is frequently colored gray by Hardy, as he sees there one more threat to the human quest for happiness and contentment.

But Hardy’s attitude toward the future is not consistently gloomy. Throughout Collected Poems one can find numerous instances where he reveals a glimmer of hope that life will eventually take a turn for the better. These poems show clearly the redemptive role played occasionally by time In Hardy’s poetry, and argue the invalidity of applying the label "pessimistic” to all of his work. The depres­ sion voiced when the transition from a happy past to an unhappy pre­ sent is explored does not remain constant when Hardy’s focus shifts to the future. Time-as-anodyne sometimes replaces time-as-villain.

This study concludes with an epilogue on the poetry of A, E. Housman who shares Hardy’s response to the past and present: both poets are struck by the painfully ironic contrast between a joyful past existing only in memory and the discomforting facts of the pre­ sent. But their responses to the future are quite different: where Hardy perceives the grounds of consolation, Housman finds only more « confinnation of man’s fretful lot. i i i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Numerous people have helped in the preparation of this dissertation. I should like to thank especially Dr. Richard Carpenter for his advice and encouragement over the past two years. Pi'ofessors Lowell Leland, Thomas Vymer, Archie Jones, and Dr. J. Edward Congleton all provided useful guidance along the way. Finally, I must thank Elizabeth, Patricia and Kathleen Noonan for their extraordinary patience and tact while this study was underway. iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

PROLOGUE: Victorian Clock-Watching...... 1

CHAPTER I: Reprisals . . „ ...... 13

CHAPTER II: Reprieves ...... 84

EPILOGUE: A Contrast With Housman ...... 108

BIBLIOGRAPHY'...... 124 I

PROLOGUE

VICTORIAN CLOCK-WATCHING

In his well-known study of the modern re-examination of belief,

The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich points to "the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness" that developed in the Nineteenth Century, and finds there much that is relevant to our own quest for meaning and compre« hension.* Nathan Scott, writing in the Journal of Religion in 1960, refers to the ’desperate uncertainty" and the "grim, black doubt" of the Victorians, and sees these responses as highly relevant to our oim age "whose sense of reality gains its most characteristic expression in the melancholy existentialist language of anxiety and dread.In

The Victorian Frame of Mind, Walter Houghton applies a judgment John

Morley made about the middle decades of the last century to the entire

Victorian age: "’It was the age of science, new knowledge, searching criticism, followed by multiplied doubts and shaken beliefs?"J "Nothing

Ipaul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven, 1952), p. 142.

^Nathan A. Scott, Jr., "The Literary Imagination and the Victorian Crisis of Faith: The Example of Thomas Hardy," Journal of Re1igion, XL (Oct., 1960), p0 273.

^Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind: 1839«1870 (New Haven and London, 1957), p. 11. 2

stoodfc” as Professor Buckley has said: "Almost every Victorian thesis produced its own antithesis, as a ceaseless dialectic worked out its It. x designs." Edith Batho and Bonamy Dobree offer as the key to the era

its "spiritual discomfort.Emory Neff summarizes effectively all of this as he claims that in this period "We see the problems of our time emerging, and may trace a growing awareness of them and endeavors to find solutions."6

One need not search long for the grounds of this unrest. It was an age of -isms. "Rationalism, evangelicalism, utilitarianism, the Oxford Movement, Christian Socialism, materialism, the Salvation

Army, agnosticism, revolve round one another in an extraordinary dance, 7 now setting to partners, now furiously attacking one another." Darwin, of course, was often cast in the role of arch-villain by his contempor­ aries. Alfred North Whitehead, who viewed the century as "an orgy of scientific triumph," sees man no longer able to fancy himself "a little lower than the angels." With the theory of evolution and natural selec- o tion, he has become "the servant and the minister of nature." The

Origin of Species, according to William Irvine, "rose before the national

^Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper: A Study In Literary Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1951; Vintage edition), p. 6.

^Edith Batho and Bonamy Dobree, The Victorians and After: 1830-1914 (New York, 1938), p. 39.

^Emery Neff, "Social Background and Social Thought," In The Reinter­ pretation of Victorian Literature, ed. Joseph E. Barker (Princeton, 1950), p. 4.

7 * 'Batho and Dobree, p. 32.

®Alfred North Whitehead, Science and The Modern World (New York, 1 925; Mentor edition), pp. 95; 91. 3

mind like a Banquo’s ghost terminating the long banquet scene of the q Exposition decade." In Noel Annan's view, "Darwin upset this tidy

and self-contained cosmos. He created a vast new time-sequence in

which man played a minute part."^®

But there were other villains as well. Besides Darwin, the men whose opinions are reflected in the famous 1860 volume of Essays

and Reviews must be included: H. B. Wilson, Frederick Temple, Mark

Pattison, Benjamin Jowett, and others less well known. These pro­ minent Anglican Church members, attempting to follow the infamous

German Biblical scholar, David Strauss, in purging Christianity of its accumulation of aberglaube, were condemned by the Court of Arches, rebuked by Bishop Wilberforce, and suspended from their duties for a year. These men, together with Darwin and Bishop Colenso who published the polemical and provocative re-examination of The Pentateuch and

The Book of Joshua, were responsible for what Willey calls "something tremendous" in the intellectual history of mankind: "Three great explosions took place which rocked the fabric of Christendom.The

"God is Dead" cry of the mid-twentieth century would have been under­ stood by the nineteenth. The net result of this theological fermenta­ tion, at least in the popular mind, "was the apparent banishment of the idea of God the creator and designer of the universe to such a distance

^William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians (New York, 1955), p. 107

l^Noel Annan, "Science, Religion, and the Critical Mind," in Back­ grounds to Victorian Literature, ed. R. A. Levine (San Francisco, 1967), p. 110.'

U-Basil Willey, Darwin and Butler: Two Versions of Evolution (London, 1960), p. 9. that it lost all religious meaning; and the substitution of chance 12 for purpose as the main explanatory principle."

Innumerable writers of the Victorian period testify to the validity of these generalizations. Tennyson expresses poignantly

the anxiety of his age in his elegy to Hallam. In In Memoriam xvi he asks: "can calm despair and wild unrest/Be tenants of a single breast,/

Or Sorrow such a changeling be?" His midnight of despair is too well known to need repeating here, but as the century wore on, fewer and fewer poets found the dawn of spiritual consolation as the Poet Laureate did. Emphasis shifts from the heart that stands up to say "I have felt," to a preoccupation with the seamy realities of the sort that prompts

Elizabeth Barrett Browning to ask, on behalf of the suffering child- laborers, "Is it likely God, with angels singing round Him/Hears our 1 3 weeping any more?" Clough’s resolution is far more typical of the age than Tennyson’s. One must "wear out heart, and nerves, and brain,/

And give oneself a world of pain. . . not because it Is "in itself a bliss," but because "it is precisely this/That keeps us all alive.

James Thomson’s "City of Dreadful Night" is a useful index to the suf­ focating fog of uncertainty through which the Victorian poets passed.

There:

The City is of Night, but not of sleep; There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain; The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,

l2l Ibid., p. 18.

^■•^"The Cry of the Children," 11, 111-112.

^"Life Is Struggle," 11. 1-2; 9-10. 5

A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain Of thought and consciousness, which never ceases, Or which some moments’ stupor but increases, This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane. (11. 113-119)

And even where consolation is finally wrenched from the grasp of doubt, one is as much struck by the painfulness of the encounter as by the sweetness of the victory. One leaves Hopkins, for example, no more impressed by "skie/Betweenpie mountains" than by "This tor­ mented mind tormenting yet"^. no more by the priest who have glory to God "for dappled things,or who saw the world "charged with the 17 grandeur of God," than by the agonized man who could exclaim--"I am gall, I am heartburn." One misreads Henley’s "Invictus" by re­ membering the buoyant last line, "I am the captain of my soul," and forgetting the jolting opening recognition of "the night that covers me,/Black as the Pit from pole to pole."

With this gnawing awareness of the gloom of the present,

Victorian poets turned frequently to the past, and reflected nostal­ gically on the days of serenity and certainty that had fallen victim to the clutches of time.

Tennyson’s "Mariana" is filled with images that represent the suffocating effects of time upon the hopes of Mariana: the "flower-

15"My Own Heart Let Me More Have Pity On," 11. 12; 4.

16"PIed Beauty," 1. 1.

I?"God’s Grandeur," 1. 1.

1®"I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark,” 1. 9. 6 plots’* are crusted ’’with blackest moss"; the nails are "rusted"; the buildings are "broken" and appear "sad and strange." Everywhere are signs of decay which correspond exactly to the decaying mind of

Mariana. The final stanza recalls in Orwellian terms the crippling effect of time: "The sparrow’s chirrup on the roof,/The slow clock ticking, and the sound/Which to the wooing wind aloof/The poplar made, did all confound/Her sense" (11. 73-77).

Elsewhere, in "Break, Break, Break" for example, time Is also the vehicle of separation between a happy past and an unhappy present.

The poem closes with the speaker’s recognition that "the tender grace of a day that Is dead/will never come back to me" (11. 15-16). This theme is repeated poignantly in "Tears, Idle Tears" that well up as the speaker recalls "The days that are no more" (1. 5).

One recalls readily the poignancy with which the tentmaker in

The Rubaiyat conveyed the inevitable progression of time: "The Bird of time has but a little way/l’o flutter--and the Bird is on the wing"

(11. 27-28); or "The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,/The

Leaves of Life keep falling one by one" (11. 31-32); or "The Moving

Finger writes; and, having writ,/Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit/

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,/Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it" (11. 281-84).

Matthew Arnold was keenly aware of the effect of time on human faith. The thii~d stanza of "Dover Beach" is typical:

The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d. But now I only hear 7

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. (11. 21-28)

Although it is not explicitly about time, Clough's "Where

Lies the Land to Which the Ship Would Go?" establishes the image

of the voyage in terms which require the reader to connect it with

time’s uncertain passage:

Where lies the land to which the ship would go? Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know. And where the land she travels from? Away, Far, far behind, is all that they can say. (11. 1-4)

Rossetti’s "Blessed Damozel," it will be recalled, from "The

fixed place of Heaven" saw "Time like a pulse shake fierce/Through

all the worlds" (11. 49-51). Merediths "Modem Love" opens with the

couple lying in bed "looking through their dead black years,/By vain

regret scrawled over the blank wall" (11. 12-13). In the third poem

of that sequence, the husband decries the disappearance of their early

bliss: "I claim a star whose light is overcast:/l claim a phantom-

woman in the Past./The hour has struck, though I heard not the bell"

(11. 14—16)1 Time’s villainy is painfully evident throughout "Modern

Love."

Swinburne’s "Laus Veneris" is likewise a monument to the blight of years. Some of that poem’s most poignant moments occur when the happy past is juxtaposed with the sad present:

Let me think yet a little; I do know These things were sweet, but sweet such years ago Their savour is all turned now into tears. (11. 229-31) 8

Gerard Manley Hopkins testifies to his recognition of time’s

inexorability in "The Wreck of the Deutschland" where he sees him­

self as "soft sift/ln an hourglass-~at the wall/Fast, but mined with

a motion, a drift,/And it crowds and it combs to the fall” (11, 25-28).

In "I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark" he conveys his frustrations over

his alleged misuse of.time:

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, 0 what black hours we have spent This night! ... But where I say Hours I mean years, mean life. . . . (11. 1-3; 506)

Novelists, too, found an unfailing source of inspiration in the

past. According to Professor Buckley, David Copperfield, is more than

any of the others, Dickens’ "novel of memory,Thackeray’s Arthur

Pendennis, Meredith’s Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Butler’s Way of All

Flesh, Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, and Hardy’s Jude The Obscure, all

reflect, according to Buckley, the "need to see a meaning in the per- 20 sonal past, to find the true self in time."

Every historical epoch had its exponent in Victorian England.

The "values of the Classical era were promoted by Arnold. Newman and the Oxford Reformers sought to return the Church to a state of Patristic purity. Ruskin, Tennyson, Morris and the Neo-Gothic architects de­

fended in various ways the Medieval period. Pater wrote energetically

l^jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Triumph of Time (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), p. 108.

20Ibid., p. 100. 9

on behalf of the Renaissance. In one way or another, the past became

a viable source of regenerative ideas at a time when "progress”

threatened virtually every traditional concept. As Buckley has noted,

"the meaning of the past remembered lay in its power to enhance the 21 quality of life in the all-demanding present."

Like his Victorian predecessors, Thomas Hardy is often pre­

occupied with the progression of time. When he writes about the past,

it Is generally a personal past that is recalled, as opposed to what

might be called the public and historical past at issue in Ruskin’s

or Arnold’s essays. But the principle is basically the same: from

an acute awareness of the discomfort of the present, the writer glances

backwards to a point in time which he judges to be relatively free of

the conditions that disturb him. zIn Hardy’s case, the villain is time

itself, the ruthless destroyer of dreams, and the relentless force which

constantly increases the distance between the happy period that exists only in memory and the disquieting period he is experiencing. Occasionally,

too, Hardy lifts his eyes from the present to speculate about time-yet- to-come, the future. This study will examine in detail his poetic re­

sponses to this cycle of time--past, present, and future. No attempt will be made to analyze his alleged "philosophy." In the first place, the poet himself spoke out on several occasions against this approach, as the next chapter will point out. Secondly, the book by Ernest

Brennecke, Jr., and the article by J. 0. Bailey, both of which appear

in the bibliography at the end of this study, cover the territory as well

21 Ibid., p. 115 10

as it seems possible to cover it. Finally, and most importantly, it

seemed unnecessary to do so in a study whose primary intention is to

shed light on the poems themselves. Hardy held differing views simul­

taneously, a characteristic which a philosopher has more trouble justi­

fying than a poet.

It is both perilous and procrustean to generalize about any­

thing, as William Carlos Williams warns at the beginning of Paterson:

To make a start, out of particulars and make them general, rolling up the sum, by defective means-- Sniffing the trees, just another dog among a lot of dogs.^2

And the method is the same, whether one is tidying up impressions of

a dirty New Jersey city, or arranging the myriad disorders of an age

in an orderly way so people can talk intelligibly about the warps,

woofs, and "seminal ideas." One should always proceed with Baconian modesty "from the specific to the general," from private thoughts to

public ideas, from politicians to national policies. This principle of inductive prudence is no less appropriate when applied to literature one can generalize safely and legitimately about a writer’s poetry only after he has surrendered himself to the poems. That something is sometimes true does not in itself justify saying it is usually true.

And what is usually true is by no means always the case. Browning’s poetry is not always optimistic; Hopkins’ is not consistently anxiety-

22Paterson, "Preface," 11. 107. 11

ridden; Charles Dickens is not done justice by Oliver Twist; and

Victorian England is not synonymous with prudery and propriety.

For this reason, this study will keep clear of the traditional

critical cliches that appear throughout most discussions of the work

of Thomas Hardy, until the poems themselves have been examined in de- ! tail. Some of the cliches are useful; others are not. But in any case

it seems appropriate to spend a good deal of time on the poems first,

"sniffing the trees" to borrow a phrase from Williams, before "rolling

up the sum."

In chapter one, Hardy’s indictment of time will be examined.

Chapter two will focus on those poems that show him deriving a measure of consolation, even a touch of buoyancy, by lifting his eyes from the days of vanished bliss and the hardship of the present to consider the promise of the future. Since Hardy is more often saddened by the pas­ sage of time than consoled by it, the first chapter is necessarily much longer than the second. To emphasize the importance of these brighter poems, an epilogue has been included—an examination of A. E. Housman’s response to the progression of time. Like Hardy, Housman frequently writes about the vanished joys of his youth, and both poets are fully aware of the discomfort of the present. But Housman’s attitude toward the future is fundamentally different from Hardy’s. Where Hardy sees a beam of light piercing the smog, Housman usually sees more smog.

This is an important difference, because these two poets are frequently considered together in studies of Victorian gloom. 12

By including a look at the presence of time in Housman, this study hopes to create a context vzithin which Hardy’s reaction to time can be more meaningfully evaluated. CHAPTER I

REPRISALS

Thomas Hardy was not a philosopher; he was an artist, attaining eminence as a novelist and poet. System and consistency may be valid objectives for a philosopher, but they are altogether too confining for an artist. Keats spoke of the poet as "chameleon,” one who can become the reality he is describing, one who is essenti­ ally passive and receptive to life. When the inspiration changes, the attitude changes with it. Hardy himself disavowed all claims to a philosophy. In his "Apology" to the 1922 edition of Late

Lyrics and Earlier, he referred to the "chance little shocks that may be caused over a book of various character like the present and its predecessors by the juxtaposition of unrelated, even discordant, effusions.The burdens of systematic arrangement having proven overwhelming, Hardy confessed that he "must trust for right note- catching to those finely-touched spirits who can divine without half a whisper, whose intuitiveness is proof against all the accidents of inconsequence" (CP, 529). Six years later, he repeated a protest frequently uttered over the years: "I also repeat what I have often

*Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (New York, 1958), p. 529. Here­ after, all references to this volume will appear in the text as CP followed by the page reference. 14

stated on such occasions, that no harmonious philosophy Is attempted 2 in these pages--or in any bygone pages of mine, for that matter."

Despite Hardy’s unequivocal position on this matter, and de­ spite the generous variety of the poetry itself, the desire to make the poet into a philosopher persists. Hoxie Neale Fairchild, for example, finds Hardy’s meliorism and pessimism "radically incom- patible." That in itself is an acceptable judgment, but when

Fairchild goes on to use it as proof of the poet’s "intellectual irresponsibility," and is distressed because "this philosophical poet possesses no philosophy at all,"1^ one must conclude that that critic has failed utterly in dealing with a poet. Likewise, one must question Ernest Brennecke’s judgment that Hardy has "through­ out his literary career drawn from the depths of a definite and fairly consistent world view."^ It is equally risky to criticize for lack of system where none was intended and to find system where none in fact exists. Similarly, Alan Tate’s objection to Hardy’s "ill- digested philosophy"^ can stand up only if a poet is compelled to

"digest" his ideas into a unified point of view. One may certainly apply this norm to a novel or a poem, or to all of them as separate *

^Thomas Hardy, Winter Words (London, 1928), p. vl. 3 Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, Vol. V: Gods of a Changing Poetry (New York, 1962), p. 253.

¿»Ibid.

^Ernest Brennecke, Thomas Hardy’s Dili verse (Boston, 1924), p. 13.

^Allen Tate, "Hardy’s Philosophic Metaphors," Southern Review, VI (1940), 108. 15 works, but to argue that the sum of the parts oust be a unified whole is a tendentious presumption« Tate finds in the poetry a

"melange" of ideas—so did the poet himself-«but the pejorative use of the word by the critic should be objected to» As Harvey

Curtis Webster has written, "Hardy is an artist rather than a philosopher«" He is not consistent: there "is considerable vari­ ation in the use of terms. It is often difficult to tell when

Hardy uses his terms metaphorically, when philosophically."2 One must recognize this from the beginning in order to deal properly with the poet. As this study will point out, Hardy is at times depressed and embittered by his experiences in life, and at other times fulfilled and optimistic. He is, in brief, a human being, sub­ ject to the same bumps and the same dreams as the rest of us.

•’Nature’s Questioning" indicates clearly the complexity of life’s enigma to Hardy. The figures in the poem think aloud about the purpose of existence:

"Has some Vast Imbecility, Mighty to build and blend, But impotent to tend, Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?

"Or come we of an' Automaton Unconscious of our pains? ... Or are we live remains Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye now gone?

"Or is it that some high Plan betides, As yet not understood, Of Evil stormed by Good, We the Forlorn Hope over which Achievement strides?" (CP, 58-59)

2Harvey Curtis Webster, On A Darkling Plain. (Chicago, 1947), po 133. 16

Several answers are offered, but it is significant (and characteristic

of Hardy) that no final solution is defined. The final stanza begins

almost matter-of-factly, "Thus things around. Ko answerer I. .

The speaker is not in any position to know the answer, and he turns

immediately to the task he is qualified to perform; he is an observer of life’s ambiguity: "Meanwhile the winds, and rains,/and Earth’s old glooms and pains/Are still the same, and Life and Death are neighbours nigh." The poem may be a melange, but this is a deliberate and effective means of expressing life’s puzzle. The first "ques­ tion," which asks if some "Vast Imbecility" has "left us to hazardy," recalls a group of poems where "chance" governs the universe. The se­ cond question, "or come we of an Automaton/’Jnconscious of our pains?", is typical of poems where Hardy speculates on the possiblity of an unconscious force behind the universe. The pantheistic point of view conveyed in the third question is less typical. Question four, which raises the possibility of "some high Plan," is raised in other poems when Hardy reveals elements of a melioristic attitude toward life.

„ "The Wanderer" is another clear expression of Hardy’s dis­ position to remain uncommitted to a philosophy. The poem opens on a note of isolation: "There is nobody on the road/But I,/And no beseeming abode/l can try/For shelter. . . ."(CP, 567); and closes with the recognition that the grave will one day end his wanderings:

"For there’s a house of clay,/My own, quite,/To roof me soon, all day/And all night." But before arriving at that conclusion, the nar­ rator speaks about his itinerant existence in terras which strongly suggest a significance beyond the literal level: 17

A wanderer, witch-drawn To and fro, To-morrow, at the dawn, On I go, And where I rest anon Do not know! (CP, 567)

This study will make it clear that Hardy was "witch-drawn

to and fro" throughout his life by varied .end often conflicting

points of view. As C. M. Bowra has stated, Hardy found no satisfac- g tory philosophical solution to life’s riddle. At issue here is his

artistic response to a world of experience, and the patterns that can

be found in his works.

"Life Laughs Onward" Is a fairly typical Hardy poem-«short, balanced, and nostalgic:

Rambling I looked for an old abode Where, years back, one had lived I knew; Its site a dwelling duly showed, But it was new.

I went where, not so long ago, The sod had riven two breasts asunder; Daisies throve gaily there, as though Ito grave were under.

I walked along a terrace where Loud children gambolled in the suit: The figure that had once sat there Was missed by none.

Life laughed and moved on unsubdued, I saw that Old succumbed to Young: ’Twas well. My too regretful mood Died on my tongue. (CP, 435)

®C. M. Bowra, Inspiration and Poetry (New York, 1955), p. 237. 18

In the first three stanzas, the speaker revisits scenes of earlier happiness--"an old abode," "a terrace’’--and is struck by the changes that have taken place. A new house has replaced the one he knew; "loud children" frolicking on a terrace have replaced the person who once sat there. The tone of the poem is undeniably sad. The final stanza offers us his commentary on these experi­ ences. "That’s the way it is," he says in effect: "I saw that

Old succumbed to Young:/’Twas well." One encounters this response frequently in Hardy’s poetry. It appears in many forms: as "The

Spinner of the Years,” the ticking of a clock, the striking of the hour, as falling leaves. And beneath them all lurks the same sin­ ister presence--time, the force which unrelentingly shuts off the happy past from the gloomy present, the force that, within the con­ text of this poem, causes age to succumb to youth, and, inevitably, youth to succumb to age. The cycle is a familiar one, but Hardy’s awareness of it is intense and, at times, deeply moving. Time’s etching upon the face of humanity is a primary cause of life’s scorn­ ful laughter.

A large measure of Hardy’s well-known anxiety can be viewed as a response to his keen awareness of the wounding effects of time on humanity. Indeed, anyone acquainted with Hardy’s novels should be prepared to find this awareness in the poetry. Jude Fawley’s unfortunate offspring, "Father Time," is an allegorical embodiment of time’s destructiveness; his murder of the other two children is,, possibly, a rather trite means of indicating this, but it makes the 19 point nonetheless. His own suicide is even more heavy-handed, but no one reads that part of the novel without understanding what the novelist is trying to say. In other novels, the point is more subtly and skillfully made. Egdon Heath, labelled by Richard Carpenter as Q •’one of the great places of fiction," is a constant reminder through­ out The Return of the Native of time’s overwhelming presence. Nothing in the world of this novel escapes contact with the Heath, and this awareness develops gradually in the reader as the action unfolds.

Jude the Obscure and The Return of the Native may be taken as repre­ senting two typical ways in which Hardy dealt with the effect of time on humanity: in statement (Little Father Time must surely qualify as that) or in image and symbol. His poetry likewise reveals numerous examples of both techniques.

A substantial number of Hardy’s poems are explicit in their

Indictment of time. Several of these deal with the defacement of beauty by this means. I Look Into My Glass’" is representative:

I look into my glass, And view my wasting skin, And say, "Would God it came to pass My heart had shrunk as thin!"

For then, I, undistrest By hearts grown cold to me, Could lonely wait my endless rest With equanimity.

^Richard Carpenter, Thomas Hardy (New York, 1964), p. 91. 20

But Time, to make me grieve, Part steals, lets part abide; And shakes this fragile frame at eve With throbbings of noontide. (CP, 72)

This poem is more textured than it first appears. In contrast to

the diminishing beauty ("my wasting skin") of the opening lines,

the flame of desire has not subsided. The full meaning of "my

heart" (1. 4) does not emerge until the final line of the poem.

But there, with the double emphasis of "throbbings" and "noontide"

(as opposed to "eve" in the preceding line), it becomes clear that

the discomfort of the speaker over the loss of beauty is deepened

by the pangs of passion which can never be satisfied. The blame

here is placed explicitly on "Time" who has kept alive the desire

while erasing beauty: "Time, to make me grieve,/Part steals,

lets part abide."

"The Revisitation" (CP, 177-81) is likewise concerned with the

loss of beauty and the presence of desire. It might even be read as a prelude to the poem just considered. "The Revisitation" is a nar­ rative, much longer than the other, in which the aging speaker journeys one night back to "The rugged ridge of Waterstone," the scene of his

last meeting with "Agnette" twenty years earlier. He discovers her there; they forgive each other for past actions—"Each one’s hand the other's grasping,/And a mutual forgiveness won, we sank to si­ lent thought. . ."--and the present seems to merge with the happy past through "A large content in us that seemed our rended lives reclasping,/And contracting years to nought." But with the light 21 of day the mood changes; reality dispels illusion, and he sees "That which Time’s transforming chisel/Had been tooling night and day for twenty years." He sees the "wasting skin" so despised by the woman

in "’I Look Into My Glass.”' He sees the transformations wrought by time, "its rendering of crease where curve was, where was raven, grizzle--/Pits, where peonies once did dwell." She awakens, and noticing his reaction, asks: "’Can you really wince and wonder/

That the sunlight should reveal you such a thing of skin and bone. . .

Her explanation is startling in its frankness: "’Yes, Sir,I am old,♦ said she,/’And the thing which should increase love turns

It quickly into scorning--/And your new-won heart from me!”’ The

"thing," of course, is time which ideally should intensify love.

Here however, it separates them'; she leaves the ridge, and they never meet again. Time’s villainy is plain, not only from the direct re­ ference to "time’s transforming chisel," and a later allusion to

"this trick on us of time," but also from numerous oblique references to it: the birds he hears again on the ridge recall those "heard when life was green"; he reflects on the "frail forgotten generations" of birds that had visited the ridge over the twenty intervening years; he refers to himself as "a sleepless swain of fifty"; and, finally, the poem ends with the conclusion that "Love is lame at fifty years."

"The Rival" (CP, 407) makes the same point. Here the speaker is a woman who is at first pleased to learn that the portrait that has caused her husband to sigh wishfully is really her own likeness 22

from years ago: "Yes, my own!/7aken when I was the season’s fairest,/

And time-lines all unknown." Eventually, though, she realizes

(like Agnette) that "he loved not the me then living/But that past

woman still." In a fit of jealousy, the woman defaces the portrait,

a totally ineffective response to the fact of her faded beauty.

The vulnerability of beauty to time’s transformations is

further evidenced in ”• In the Night She Came”' (CP, 212-213). The

poem opens with the speaker’s vow that his affections will not be

undone by "time’s mere assault." But that night he is visited in a

dream by the apparition of his beloved "toothless, and wan, and old,/

with leaden concaves round her eyes,/And wrinkles manifold." When

thus confronted by the work of time upon the beauty of his beloved,

he hesitates when asked if he really meant what he said: "’Well. . .

I did not think/You would test me quite so soon!”’ The next day, the

pair "seemed to be/Divided by some shade." Human beauty and time are

not often compatible in Hardy’s poetry. Viewed in light of poems of

this type, Samuel Hynes’ judgment that Hardy was deeply aware "of

the inexorability of time, and of the meaninglessness and Inevitability of suffering"^ rings true. In poem after poem, beauty clashes with the passage of years and, almost invariably, time emerges unscathed

by the encounter.

In the first poem in the "She, To Him” quartet, time’s im­ pact on beauty is stated explicitly in the opening lines: "When

^Samuel Hynes, The Pattern of Hardy’s Poetry (Chapel Hill, 1962), p. 138. 23 you shall see roe in the toils of time,/My lauded beauties carried off from me,/My eyes no longer stars as in their prime,/My name forgot of Maiden Fair and Free. . ." (CP, 11-12). After cataloging the unhappy changes that the passing of years will cause in her, and predicting what her lover's response will be when he is ’’irked that they have withered so," she asks him to remember that she is not the cause of these changes, but is the helpless victim of "Sportman Time" who "rears his brood to kill." |?This suggestion that time is deliberately sinister will be examined later when Hardy’s thoughts on causality are studied, but it should be noted that several other poems make the same suggestions?) In another poem, "God's Educa­ tion," the speaker is in a dialogue with God where he questions the

Deity’s motivation in blighting the beauty of his beloved. God’s response places the blame squarely on time: "I bid time throw/Thera carelessly away." (CP, 261-262) It is sufficient for present purposes to note these poems as two further examples of the by now familiar sequence from beauty to blight. "A Broken Appointment" (CP, 124) is another explicit exposure of time's cruelty: "You did not come,/And marching time drew on, and wore me numb. . ." Here, however, the literal statement is reinforced in imagery: "Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,/You did not come." The heavy succession of stresses in the line reproduces metrically the striking of the clock, and intensifies the reader’s awareness of the sad, heavy impact of the broken appointment. In the second and final stanza, the speaker’s reference to himself as "a time torn man" completes the poem’s case against this familiar force. 24

Time’s caprice again receives literal and symbolic treatment

in "’By the Runic Stone”' (CP, 442). Here, in a setting which

invites remembrances of the vastness of human history-~not unlike

the Roman setting of Housman’s "On Wenlock Edge"--two lovers sit,

blissfully unaware that the future will treat their union with hostility

"It might have strown/Their zest with qualms to see,/As in a glass,

time toss their history/From zone to zone." This skepticism about

the endurance of affection is repeated in "Fetching Her" (CP, 602-

603). To a friend who has been caught up in preparing a dream house

for his beloved, the speaker offers this solemn admonition: "Time

is prompt to expugn,/My friend,/Such magic-minted conjurings."

This poem treats as well the unwisdom of transplanting a person to

a new environment and expecting her to flourish there, but that time

is wrapped up in all of this is not to be overlooked.

Time is an ominous presence containing death in "Under

Highstoy Hill" (CP, 754). Four men set out on an excursion marked

by pleasure and joviality: "We laughed beneath the moonlight blink,/

Said.supper would be to our mind,/And did not think/Of time, and what might lie behind." What lies "behind" becomes clear in the

final stanza where the reader learns that "all of the four then climbing here/But one are ghosts, and he brow-lined." It is inter­ esting to note that the phrase "brow-lined" is merely a male version of the familiar Hardy theme seen earlier in this essay--women’s beauty fades; men’s faces grow lines. Numerous other poems contain equally explicit statements of t-"'

time’s eroding impact on humanity. In "After A Journey" (CP, 328-

329) it is "time’s derision"; in "At Castle Boterel" (CP, 230-

231) it Is "time’s unflinching rigour"; in "The Inscription" (CP,

641-644), it is "time’s fierce frost"; in "A Sheep Fair" (CP, 396-

697) it is "time has trailed lengthily"; in ’"Nothing Matters Much”’.*-’

(CP, 787-788) it is "time that builds. . .time that shatters."

Elsewhere, particularly in The Dynasts, time assumes the form of some sinister celestial force, like the "Spirit of the Years." In

"The Convergence of the Twain" (CP, 288-289) it is the "Spinner of the years," and its function here is exactly analogous to Its func­ tion in Hardy’s epic. What makes the shorter poem more appropriate to be dealt with here is, of course, it compactness, but also its su­ perior skill: Hardy relies more on imagery here than in the poems just considered. As Richard Carpenter has said of it, this piece is really

"uncharacteristic" of Hardy’s work: "in its focus on a specific his­ torical event, its imagery, and its narrative development,"^ But thematically, this poem is typical of Hardy--it portrays vividly the calamitous intersection of time with human design. The final stanzas explain the cause of the tragedy:

VIII

And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

11 Carpenter, p. 172 26

IX

Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see The Intimate welding of their later history.

X

Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event.

XI

Till the Spinner of the Years Said "NowJ" And each one hears, And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres. (CP, 288-289)

Time, personified as the "Spinner of the years," causes destruction in human life at the precise instant of collision, and the sudden

"Nowl" of the final stanza underscores the jolting union of these elements.

Like "The Convergence of the Twain," "Shut Out that Moon" is more compact and textured than the poems cited earlier:

Close up the casement, draw the blind, Shut out that stealing moon, She wears too much the guise she wore Before our lutes were strewn With years-deep dust, and names we read On a white stone were hewn.

Step not out on the dew-dashed lawn To view the Lady’s Chair, Immense Orion’s glittering form, The Less and Greater Bear: Stay in; to such sights we were drawn When faded Ones were fair.

Brush not the bough for midnight scents That come forth lingeringly, And wake the same sweet sentiments They breathed to you and me When living seemed a laugh, and love All it was said to beo Within the common lamp-lit room Prison my eyes and thought; Let dingy details crudely loom, Mechanic speech be wrought: Too fragrant was Life’s early bloom, Too tart the fruit it brought! (CP, 201)

The ’’stealing moon” of stanza one, the star formation of

stanza two--"The Lady’s Chair,/Immense Orion’s glittering form,/

The Less and Greater Bear;"—and the "midnight scents" of the third

are all concrete images which remind the speaker of happier days when

love was alive and vibrant. Hardy needs no personified abstraction

to complete the thought here. Instead of "marching time’s" allegori­

cal appearance, Hardy relies on key images to say the same thing. In

stanza one, instead of telling the reader that time has brought heart­ ache, the poet refers to the past "before our lutes were strewn/

With years-deep dust." In another poem he may have said something

like "before marching time trampled our hopes." Similarly, the in­ volvement of time In his sadness is effectively conveyed here by the reference to names on cemetery monuments instead of by an explicit statement of time’s villainy. The reader realizes for himself the changes caused by the passage of years without being told directly.

There are two worlds in this poem. The first, the world of natural beauty, reminds him of an idyllic past, too painfully gone to be re­ called by him. The other, the world of his "common lamp-lit room," is his response to this pain. The constant ironic presence of both realms gives intensity to the poem, and lifts it above pieces like

"God’s Education": 28

I saw him steal the light away That haunted in her eye: It went so gently none could say More than that it was there one day And missing by-and-by.

I watched her longer, and he stole ’ Her lily tincts and rose; All her young sprightliness of soul Next fell beneath his cold control, And disappeared like those.

I asked: "Why do you serve her so? Do you, for some glad day, Hoard these her sweets--?" He said, "0 no They charm not me; I bid Time throw Them carelessly away."

Said I: "We call that cruelty-- We, your poor mortal kind." (CP, 261)

The poem begins with sensitive and persuasive imagery—"That haunted in her eye"; "Her lily tincts and rose*;—but from the end of stanza two there is a gradual deterioration of texture as the images become more abstract—"her young sprightliness of soul";

"his cold control." The poem ends with a philosophical dialogue, bogged down in abstraction, unlike "Shut Out that Moon" whose concrete ness-endures to the end.

"Green Slates" is less successful than the former but more successful than the latter. It is instructive to look at this poem carefully because it shows Hardy at his best and worst:

It happened once, before the duller Loomings of life defined them, I searched for slates of greenish colour A quarry where men mined them;

And saw, the while I peered around there, In the quarry standing A form against the slate background there, Of fairness eye-commanding. 29

And now, though fifty years have flown me, With all their dreams and duties, And strange-pipped dice my hand has thrown me And dust are all her beauties,

Green slates--seen high on roofs, or lower In waggon, truck, or lorry- Cry out: "Our home was where you saw her Standing in the quarryl" (CP, 676)

The basic concept of this piece is quite successful as a concept-- a man is reminded of his beloved by slates on rooftops, having met her fifty years earlier in a quarry. As in "Shut Out that Moon," a physical object acts as a springboard into the past. But the temptations into abstraction were always tantalizing to Hardy, and the poem is very fuzzily executed: "duller/Loomings of life" is vague; "Of fairness eye-commanding" is not only vague but inappropri­ ately awkward as well; "strange-pipped dice my hand has thrown me" smacks of the deus ex machina. The opening of the last stanza seems altogether satisfactory: "Green slates--seen high on roofs, or lo-wer/

In waggon, truck, or lorry--" is explicit and consistent. But this brief poetic gain is hurled back in the last two lines where the slates become personified and speak for themselves. Nothing earlier in the piece prepared the reader for this device, and his only con­ solation is that the speaker refrained from entering upon an abstract debate with the slates.

In both "Shut Out that Moon" and "Green Slates," the concrete images prompt the speaker into recalling happier days before the wrath of time was able to assault his love. The ironic contrasts 30 set up between the constant unchanging object and his changed love establish a dramatic and convincing tension within the structure of the poem. This ironic polarity was frequently used by Hardy, and it is a characteristic of his better work. In "The Frozen Green­ house" the same treatment is evident:

"There was a frost Last night I" she said, "And the stove was forgot When we went to bed, And the greenhouse plants Are frozen dead!"

By the breakfast blaze Blank-faced spoke she, Her scared young look Seeming to be The very symbol Of tragedy.

The frost is fiercer Than then to-day, As I pass the place Of her once dismay, But the greenhouse stands Warm, tight, and gay, •

While she who grieved At the sad lot Of her pretty plants-- Cold, iced, forgot-- Herself is colder, And knows it not. (CP, 701)

The first stanza Introduces the central image, the greenhouse, which houses the dead plants. The second stanza underscores the thematic seriousness and elevates the event from the mundane to the cosmi- cally significant—the woman is "Blank-faced," and "scared," her

"look" the "very symbol/of tragedy." Stanza three has two purposes. 31

Besides suggesting the passage of years (the second line accomplishes this with its juxtaposition of "then" and "to-day"--the time of the greenhouse failure versus the time of the poem), it also relates the endurance of the greenhouse which stands "Warm, tight, and gay" despite the fact that "The frost is fiercer" now than it was before.

A parting, painful twist of irony is conveyed in the final stanza: unlike the durable greenhouse, the woman "who grieved" over the de­ struction of "her pretty plants" is herself dead, "Cold, iced, for­ got," like her plants. Again, it is the larger context of natural permanence that gives the poem its bite.

"A House With A History" repeats this theme:

There is a house in a city street Some past ones made their own; Its floors were criss-crossed by their feet, And their babblings beat From ceiling to white hearth-stone.

And who are peopling its parlours now? Who talk across its floor? Mere freshlings are they, blank of brow, Who read not how Its prime had passed before

- Their raw equipments, scenes, and says Afflicted its memoried face, That had seen every larger phase Of human ways Before these filled the place.

To them that house’s tale is theirs, No former voices call Aloud therein. Its aspect bears Their joys and cares , Alone, from wall to wall. (CP, 609) 32

The central, image is the house itself, functioning as a tender link between the past and the present® Recalling the time when

•’Its floors were criss-crossed" by other inhabitants, and its rooms were filled with the "babblings" of other dwellers, the speaker asks the ironic questions in stanza two: "who are peopling its parlours now?/Who talk across its floor?" Their specific identity is not important to him. All that really matters is their total unaware­ ness of the memories he associates with the structure: "To them the house’s tale is theirs/No former voices call/Aloud therein."

The irony is deeper here than in the other poems. Besides the sur­ face irony of a house that pains him while it pleases others, the speaker’s own sweeping recall is contrasted with the foreshortened awareness of the others. One is left knowing full well that the

"joys and cares" of the occupants will, like the speaker’s, pass on.

"Drawing Details in an Old Church" is another good example of

Hardy’s skill with images:

I hear the bell-rope sawing, And the oil-less axle grind, As I sit alone here drawing What some Gothic brain designed; And I catch the toll that follows From the lagging bell, Ere it spreads to hills and hollows Where people dwell.

I ask not whom It tolls for, Incurious who he be; So, some morrow, when those knolls for One unguessed, sound out for me, A stranger, loitering under In nave or choir, May think, too, "Whose, I wonder?" But not inquire. (CP, 653) 33

The sounds of the "bell-rope," the squeaking of the "oil-less axle,"

and the "toll" of the "the lagging bell" combine with the heavy stresses

of the first two lines into an almost surrealistic cacophony, filling

the poem with the clamor of time. This is Hardy at his best, re­

placing abstract statement with the more poignant sounds of audible

Imagery. In the Donnesque second stanza, the emphasis shifts from

the sounds to the persona’s reaction, which is to ignore the reasons

for the knelling: "I ask not whom it tolls for." Where the opening

stanza related the bells to the past--the church, we are told, was

designed by "some Gothic brain"—the second looks ahead to the fu­

ture, "some morrow," when the bells will "sound out for me," and

when the passerby will, like the persona, wonder about their meaning

"But not inquire." Again, the central image, the bells’ tolling,

is constant, unchanged by the passing of years, while the human

audience plays out the inevitable cycle from life to death. There

is a perfect proportion here between the concept and the construct,

and no "philosophy" remains unabsorbed by craft.

Hardy’s architectural instincts, although abandoned pro­

fessionally, occasionally led him into other poetic exploitations

of these earlier years. Like "Drawing Details," "Copying Archi­

tecture in an Old Minster" recalls the days of his building ap­ prenticeship, and Is executed with the same masonic concreteness:

How smartly the quarters of the hour march by ' That the jack-o’-clock never forgets; Ding-dong; and before I have traced a cusp’s eye, Or got the true twist of the ogee over, A double ding-dong ricochetts. 34

Just so did he clang here before I came, And so will he clang when I’m gone Through the Minster’s cavernous hdllows»«the same Tale of hours never more to be will he deliver To the speechless midnight and dawn!

I grow to conceive it a call to ghosts, Whose mould lies below and around. Yes; the next "Come, come," draws them out from their posts, And they gather, and one shade appears, and another, As the eve-damps creep from the ground.

See--A courtenay stands by his quatre-foiled tomb, And a Duke and his Duchess near; And one Sir Edmund in columned gloom. And a Saxon king by the presbytery chamber; And shapes unknown in the rear.

Maybe they have met for a parle on some plan To better ail-stricken mankind; I catch their cheepings, though thinner than The overhead creak of a passager’s pinion When leaving land behind.

Or perhaps they speak to the yet unborn, And caution them not to come To a world so ancient and trouble-tom, Of foiled intents, vain lovingkindness, And ardours chilled and numb.

They waste to fog as I stir and stand, And move from the arched recess, And pick up the drawing that slipped from my hand, And feel for the pencil I dropped in the cranny In a moment’s forgetfulness. (CP, 411-12)

The poem opens with all the colloquial immediacy and jangling irregularity of a Browning monologue, and moves quickly from the

’’ding-dong" pealing of the church bells marking the quarter hours to the speaker’s reflections. There is the same squinting glance back into the past and ahead into the future--"Just so did he clang here before I came,/And so will he clang when I'm gone"--that appeared in the preceding poem. In the last five stanzas, Hardy’s craft is 35 consummate as he robs the tombs of their inhabitants and arranges them in a mute, murky indictment of the relentlessness of time.

One by one he identifies the figures in the foreground--"A Courtenay,"

"a Duke and his Duchess," "one Sir Edmund," "a Saxon king"--who stand out against "shapes unknown in the rear." Hardy moves from sight to significance, but tempers phrases of abstraction with meta­ phor. In stanza five, for example, the poem moves swiftly from the persona’s tentative inference that the spirits may have gathered for a "parie ... To better ail-stricken mankind," a typically philoso­ phical musing in Hardy’s work, back to the concrete scene, this time to the murmurings of those present: "I catch their cheepings, though thinner than/The overhead creak of a passager’s pinion/When leaving land behind." The analogy is apt, and rescues the stanza from pro­ saicness. The sixth stanza returns to analysis in terms grown nearly cliches in Collected Poems—-they may be speaking to the "yet unborn," warning them not to come to this "trouble-tom" world of "foiled in­ tents," and "vain lovingkindness." But the seventh and final stanza returns to clear imagery--"They waste to fog" and "move from the arched recess"--and closes, as it ware, on solid ground: the persona re­ trieves the sketch he had dropped and gropes for his pencil.

One might apply William Carlos Williams’ prescription to poems like this, for it offers a convincing explanation of the poetic process and provides a clear criterion one might apply to Hardy’s work to separate the good from the banal: "It isn’t what he (the poet|says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, and 36

with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic

movement of its own to verify its authenticity."^ One might say,

with only a minimum of qualification, that the less Hardy says, the

more his poetry says, and says it better than he can.

"To Shakespeare" should be considered in this section, since

it also deals with the inexorability of time in the same metaphoric

and symbolic manner. The opening stanzas contain a fairly conventional

apostrophe, flawed by the inevitable rhetoric: "Bright baffling Soul,

least capturable of themes"; "Through human orbits thy discourse to­

day,/. . . throbs on/ln harmonies that cow Oblivion." But the texture

grows richer in the remainder of the piece:

And yet, at thy last breath, with mindless note The borough clocks but samely tongued the hour The Avon just as always glassed the tower, Thy age was published on thy passing-bell But in due rote With other dwellers’ deaths accorded a like knell.

And at the strokes some townsman (met, maybe, And thereon queried by some squire’s good dame Driving in shopward) may have given thy name, With, "Yes, a worthy man and well-to-do; Though, as for me, - I knew him but by just a neighbour’s nod, ’tis true.

"I* faith, few knew him much here, save by word, He having elsewhere led his busier life; Though to be sure he left with us his wife." --"Ah, one of the tradesmen’s sons, I now recall. ... Witty, I've heard. ... We did not know him. ... Well, good-day. Death comes to all."

ll2 This statement is quoted in Victorian Poetry and Poetics, ed. Walter S. Houghton and Robert Stange (Boston, 1968), p. 814. 37

So, like a strange bright bird wa sometimes find To mingle with the barn-door brood awhile, Then vanish from their homely domicile-- Into man’s poesy, wa wot not whence, Flew thy strange mind, Lodged there a radiant guest, and sped for ever thence. (CP, 412-13)

In sharp contrast to the formal rhetoric of the beginning stanzas,

the third stanza introduces several short, balanced phrases which

focus on the innocuousness of Shakespeare’s death to his fellow

villagers. These phrases with their brevity and pointed imagery,

establish an altogether different tone--a routine, matter-of-fact

casualness--from the heightened panegyric of the first two stanzas.

Time here is not an abstraction, not a force thrust into the poem.

It is Instead an Integral part of the landscape, a clock’s "mindless

note," a belltower mirrored ("glassed") In the Avon, a "passing-

bell." The clock and the bells are at once the impersonal markers of the poet’s death as well as symbolic representatives of time, the messenger of death.

The tone shifts again in the next two stanzas with the homely and detached comments about the event delivered by Shakespeare’s

fellow townsmen. When read in view of the opening eulogy with its

lofty recognition of genius, these stanzas are deeply ironic. To the one, he was "a worthy man and well-to-do," known only by "a neigh­ bour’s nod." To the other, "the tradesmen’s son" and "Witty." The final line in that stanza, a combination of detachment ("We did not know Him"), good manners ("Well, good-day"), and homespun philosophy

("Death comes to all") strengthens that tone. Against that, the con­ cluding stanza with its epic-like simile ("like a strange bright bird 38 we sometimes find. . .") and soaring praise is joltingly ironic.

Hardy frequently employs the bell Image as a reminder of man's mortality, but usually within the context of a church tower, as in "To Shakespeare." A notable exception to the familiar context

Is found in "The High-School Lawn" where the setting Is a schoolyard:

Gray prinked with rose, White tipped with blue, Sioes with gay hose, Sleeves of chrome hue; Fluffed frills of white, Dark bordered light; Such shimmerings through Trees of emerald green are eyed This afternoon, from the road outside.

They whirl around: Many laughters run With a cascade's sound; Then a mere one. A bell: they flee: Silence then: — So it will be Some day again With them,--with roe. (CP, 780-81)

With the skills of Monet or Renoir, Hardy paints a brilliantly colored canvas in the opening stanza. Abandoning his preference for bold outlines and careful drawing, Hardy indulges here In the tech­ niques of Impressionism: "Gray" and "rose" here, "White end "blue" there, "Fluffed frills," "emerald green" trees—all mix together In a blur of brightness. The scene is not drawn in detail; it is sug­ gested by the careful application of colors to canvas, and the perci­ pient fills In the outlines for himself. Stanza two shifts the focus from color to motion, until the sound of the bell interrupts the 39 activity, and signals the final somber reflection that someday both the speaker and the children will be cloaked in impenetrable silence and stillness. The heavy pauses of "A bell: they flee:/Silence then:--" contrast abruptly with the color-in-mot ion effects of the poem to that point, and together with the imagined sounds of the bell itself, they call the persona from the present to the grayer future.

Given the seriousness of the final thoughts, the concluding abstrac­ tions seem appropriate, especially since they flow out of an unchar­ acteristically vivid context. Although the setting is literally a schoolyard, one is struck by the similarities between this poem and one like "Copying Architecture in an Old Minster" where the setting

Is more obviously connected with reflections on mortality. In that poem, the observation that the bell "did ». . . clang before I came,/

And so will clang when I’m gone" conveys the same acute awareness of mutability as the measured and hesitant remarks on the meaning of the school bell: "A bell: they flee:/Silence then:--/So It will be/

Some day again/With them,—with me." In both poems, the bell provides the - transitIon from observation to inference.

A group of poems in Time’s Laughingstocks makes skillful use of Images that remain constant while human life and values pass away under the influence of time« "Bereft" is typical:

In the black winter morning No light will be struck near my eyes While the clock in the stairway is warning For five, when he used to rise. Leave the door unbarred, The clock unwound. Make my lone bed hard— Would ’twere underground! 40

When the summer dawns clearly, And the appletree-tops seem alight, Who will undraw the curtain and cheerly Call out that the morning is bright?

When I tarry at market No form will cross Durnover Lea In the gathering darkness, to hark at Grey’s Bridge for the pit-pat o’ me.

When the supper crock’s steaming, And the time Is the time of his tread, I shall sit by the fire and wait dreaming In a silence as of the dead. Leave the door unbarred, The clock unwound, Make my lone bed hard— Would ’twere underground! (CP, 192-193)

The poem presents a catalogue of objects and events once associated

with joy but which now, since the death of the persona’s beloved,

are painful reminders of personal loss. The "clock In the stairway. . ."

will strike five; the sun will still emblazon the "appletree-tops";

the speaker will still walk home from market; supper will still be

prepared. But behind all this Is loneliness, and the agony of final

separation. No one will light the lamp at dawn, or open the curtains,

or accompany her home from market, or wait as she prepares supper.

Like Mariana in her "moated grange," the woman is driven by her plight

into the contemplation of suicide as an escape from pain. One ought

to note the careful chronology of this poem which moves subtly from

early morning darkness, to dawn in stanza two, to afternoon in the next,

and finally to nighttime. This tightly woven sti’ucture becomes a microcosm of the speaker’s unhappy existence, and, unlike most of the

Collected Poems, is totally free from the author’s intrusions. 41

In "The Rejected Member’s Wife," (CP, 199) the balcony is the central and constant object: "We shall see her no more/Cn the balcony,/

Smiling, while hurt, at the roar/As of surging sea/From the stormy sturdy band/Who have doomed her lord’s cause." But her place there will be occupied by other people, "candidates" and "candidates* wives."

"Time Passes," Hardy shouts in other places, but not here. The point is better made in the last stanza with its juxtaposition of present activity with tender memories of the woman who once stood there:

And the balcony will fill When such times are renewed, And the throng in the street will thrill With to-day’s mettled mood; But she will no more stand In the sunshine there, With that wave of her white-gloved hand, And that chestnut hair. (CP, 199)

The poignant nostalgia of the final two lines, evoked by his memories of "her white-gloved hand,/And that chestnut hair" is deftly and delicately executed, and represents Hardy at his best.

In "Autumn in King Hintock Park," leaves are the central symbolj Here by the baring bough Raking up leaves, Often I ponder how Springtime deceives,-- I, an old woman now, Raking up leaves.

Here in the avenue Raking up leaves, Lords’ ladies pass in view, Until one heaves Sighs at life’s russet hue, Raking up leaves! 42

Just as my shape you see Raking up leaves, I saw, when fresh and free, Those memory weaves Into grey ghosts by me, Raking tip leaves.

Yet, Dear, though one may sigh, Raking up leaves, New Leaves will dance on high— Earth never grieves I»» Will not, when missed am I Raking up leaves. (CP, 200)

The poem, like "Bereft," is a highly structured composition. From the refrain, "Raking up leaves" which appears twice in each of the four stanzas, to the regular alternation of six syllable and five syllable lines, the poem reveals Hardy’s careful craftsmanship.

This architectonic balance is paralleled by a balance of sense: the first stanza introduces the female persona who is raking the autumn leaves, and poses the enigmatic statement, "Often I ponder how/Spring- tirae deceives." The central stanzas explain her meaning: the sight of the old woman provoked a sigh from one of the passing women, just as a similar sight years ago had affected the persona. That is, the woman’s own "springtime" had passed inevitably into her "russet hue," or autumn. The final stanza completes the Irony, thlike the trees which will continue to bear new leaves, to replace the withered fall leaves with springtime greenery, the woman herself will die, and that will be the end of her. Springtime’s deception is that the new life

It promises also houses the seeds of decay, just as youth promises death as much a3 it promises life and fulfillment. 43

The seventh and final poem in the group entitled "At Caster-

bridge Fair" is a typical poem built upon this fundamental and ironic

polarity:

After the Fair

The singers are gone from the Cornmarket-place With their broadsheets of rhymes, The street rings no longer in treble and bass With their skits on the times, And the Cross, lately thronged, is a dim naked space That but echoes the stammering chimes.

From Clock-corner steps, as each quarter ding-dongs, Away the folk roam By the "Hart" and Grey’s Bridge into byways and "drongs," Or across the ridged loam; The younger ones shrilling the lately heard songs, The old saying, "Would we were home."

The shy-seeming maiden so mute in the fair Now rattles and talks, And that one who looked the most swaggering there Grows sad as she walks, And she who seemed eaten by cankering care In statuesque sturdiness stalks.

And midnight clears High Street of all but the ghosts Of its buried burghees, From the latest far back to those old Roman hosts Whose remains one yet sees, Who loved, laughed, and fought, hailed their friends, drank ' their toasts At their meeting-times here, just as these 1 (CP, 226)

Like the deceptiveness of "Springtime" seen In the preceding poem, the Casterbridge Fair is also a deception. In the first place, the fairgrounds are not permanent. As the poem opens, "The singers are gone," and the "street rings no longer" with the sounds of their mirth.

All that lingers is memory, and the fairgrounds have become "a dim naked space." Like departing actors, the villagers are seen trailing off 44

Into the wings of the stage, at first from a distance—we see them as young or old, but not yet as individuals—and then in revealing closeup: the young girl who was shy at the fair is now chatty; the conceited girl is now saddened; the anxious and worried maiden now firm. Without being told by Hardy, the reader realizes that the sur­ face gaiety of the holiday is marred by the reality of sadness. Like a bright light, the Casterbrldge Fair reveals clearly the hidden re­ cesses of character, unflattering and unhappy discoveries that con­ trast sharply with the alleged joy of the scene. The first maid’s reticence is truer of her than her garrulous departure. The swag­ gers of the second girl reveal a deep-rooted vanity normally checked.

And the "statuesque sturdiness" of the third is less representative of her real self than the worries worn visibly at the fair.

The final stanza intensifies the irony, and links the present with the past. "Cornmarket-place," the scene of the Casterbrldge

Fair, is also the burial place of "burled burghees,/From the latest far back to those old Roman hosts/Whose remains one yet sees."

Like the more recent mirth-makers, the Romans "loved, laughed and fought, hailed their friends, drank their toasts/At their meeting-times here, just as these!" The playground of the present is the grave- y yard of the past. Joy, like Spring, will not endure forever. The reader is left to conclude for himself that the Casterbrldge merri­ ment will pass, like the Romans’. In fact, the profiles of the three young ladies reveal the forces already at work. "Time will tell," Hardy is not above saying in other poems. But the subtle 45

introduction of the buried Romans in the last stanza makes the point more skillfully and artistically.

Viewed in light of these poems, one is forced to disagree with G. M. Young’s judgment that Hardy’s poetry is ”a commentary on a life that had not been happy.it is precisely because of his recollection of an abundance of happy moments that their loss is so painful to Hardy. The fundamental irony of life is that the good must inevitably give ground to the bleak, that love and hope and joy,

like springtime leaves and Casterbridge Fairs, are subject to decay.

Because the good was so intense, the loss seems so acute. It is wholly misleading then to generalize that the poems convey only unhappiness-unhappiness now perhaps, but not necessarily unhappiness then. Babette Deutsch is much nearer the mark when she observes

Hardy’s ’'overwhelming" awareness "of the pastness of the past."^

Time’s inexorable movement constantly increases the gap between the past with its joys and the present with its frustrations. Hardy re­ turns again and again to this theme in Collected Poems. "After the

Fair" Is a skillful variation on this attitude. The dramatic moment of the poem is an amalgam of joy and sorrow, life and death, youth and old age.

"Last Week in October" Is addressed to the same concept:

The trees are undressing, and fling in many places-- On the gray road, the roof, the window-sill--

M. Young, Last Essays (London, 1950), p. 264.

^Babette Deutsch, Poetry In Our Time (New York, 1956), p. 8. 46 z

Their radiant robes and ribbons and yellow laces; A leaf each second so Is flung at will, Here, there, another and another, still and still.

A spider’s web has caught one while downcoining, That stays there dangling when the rest pass on; Like a suspended criminal hangs he, mumming In golden garb, while one yet green, high yon, Trembles, as fearing such a fate for himself anon. (CP, 673)

Autumn is a.familiar setting In Collected Poems, a natural symbol

of the central paradoxes that stirred Thomas Hardy. In this poem

the more common Coleridgean death-in-life tension is not made ex­

plicit, but one is aware nonetheless that the leaves pictured as

the bright clothing cast off by the trees--"radiant robes and rib­

bons and yellow laces"--are doomed to wither and crumble in time.

Like wanton maids, the trees shed their finery with careless abandon—

"Here, there, another and another, still and still." The reader is

not surprised that the inflated expectancy of the first stanza is

reversed in the second, but the precise nature of this reversal

is surely surprising. Instead of presiding at the interment of

October’s foliage, the reader witnesses the confinement of one of the

leaves in a spider’s web, as it hangs in midair "Like a suspended criminal." This sudden juxtaposition of the leaf, brilliant"In golden

garb," with its rude prison, is an effective reminder of the fragility of beauty. The green leaf still attached to the tree, like the woman of "I Look Into My Glass" seen earlier, can see its own fate in the plight of the trapped leaf, and "Trembles, as fearing such a fate for himself anon," 47

"Life and Death at Sunrise" likewise contains the juxtaposi­

tion of expectancy with its opposite:

The hills uncap their tops Of woodland, pasture, copse, And look on the layers of mist At their foot that still persist: They are like awakened sleepers on one elbow lifted, Who gaze around to learn if things during night have shifted.

A waggon creaks up from the fog With a laboured leisurely jog; ' Then a horseman from off the hill-tip Comes clapping down into the dip; While woodlarks, finches, sparrows, try to entune at one time, And cocks and hens and cows and bulls take up the chime.

With a shouldered basket and flagon A man meets the one with the waggon, And both the men halt of long use. •’Well," the waggoner says, "what’s the news?" "--’Tis a boy this time. You’ve just met the doctor trotting back. She’s doing very well. And we think we shall call him ’Jack.’"

"And what have you got covered there?" He nods to the waggon and mare. "Oh, a coffin for old John Thinn: We are just going to put him in." "—So he’s gone at last. He always had a good constitution." "—He was ninety-odd. He could call up the French Revolution." (CP, 695)

Like the opening of "Last Week in October," the first two stanzas here establish an idyllic world reminiscent of the pastoral tradi­ tion. Aside from the fancied action of the hills who "gaze around to learn if things during night have shifted’’ (they have, but we do not learn this until stanza three), nothing in the first half of the poem disturbs the serenity of the setting. These stanzas display, besides the elaborate visual imagery of the personified hills, a concert of auditory images: the wagon "creaks" and "jogs"; the horse

"Comes clapping"; "woodlarks, finches, sparrows, try to entune," 48

while "cocks and hens and cows and bulls take up the chime." Then

the two men meet, the one bearing news of the birth of a child, the

other carrying "a coffin for old John Thinn," Hardy never intrudes:

the men exchange their news In an Ironically casual dialogue, and

the poem ends with the waggoner’s statement that John Thinn "was

ninety-odd. He could call up the French Revolution." This event,

apparently accidental on the narrative level, is not accidental at all

on another level: life is a cycle; birth and death are its poles; and neither one can be viewed meaningfully apart from the other. "Life

is this way" Hardy may have been tempted to say elsewhere, but here,

as in his best work generally, the simple juxtaposition of these events makes the point more decisively. The time of day itself, dawn, tradi­ tionally the moment of new life and fulfillment, is likewise the moment of death. From birth, through time, to death--the pattern is no stranger to Hardy’s work.

"Before and After Summer" captures clearly Hardy’s insight into the paradoxical and ironic union of hope and gloom:

, Looking forward to the spring One puts up with anything. On this February day Though the winds leap down the street Wintry scourgings seem but play, And these later shafts of sleet --Sharper pointed than the first’-« And these later snows—the worst— Are as a half-transparent blind Riddled by rays from sun behind.

Shadows of the October pine Reach into this room of mine: On the pine there swings a bird; He is shadowed with the tree. Mutely perched he bills no word; 49

Blank as 1 am even is he. For those happy suns are past, Fore-discerned in winter last. When went by their pleasure, then? I, alas, perceived not when. (CP, 314)

The symmetry of the piece is compelling, divided as it is into equal halves, the one dominated by anticipation of spring, the other by autumnal reflection on the fleetingness of joy. Spring, used often by Hardy to evoke youthful, aspiring hopes and expectations, is an­ ticipated so keenly in the opening stanza that the persona Is able to endure the chills and blasts of winter, warmed by thoughts of what the future will bring. The fourth and fifth lines, with the exuberant verb ’’leap" to describe the action of the wind, and the clear followup reference to the playfulness of "Wintry scourgings," gloss over the harsh reality of the "shafts of sleet" and "later snows."

Emphasis here is on brightness and coltishness: "winds leap," "Wintry scourgings seem but play," "Riddled by rays from sun behind." In tone and imagery, the second part of the poem Is an abrupt shift from the first: "Shadows of the October pine" creep into his room; the bird is "shadowed," "Mutely perched," and "Blank as I am"; "those happy suns" looked forward to in February "are past." Stunned by the sudden absence of summer joys, the persona can only ask feebly, "When went by their pleasure, then?" and express lamely his bewilderment, "I, alas, perceived not when." So fleeting Is pleasure, It leaves no clear impact upon the memory of the speaker. The past blurs with the pre­ sent, and together they conspire to depress and confuse him. Once again,

Spring is deceptive: just as surely as It signals promise, It signals 50

the ultimate breaking of that promise. One is reminded here of the

final lines of Shelley’s "Mutability"--"Man*s yesterday may ne’er be

like his morrow;/Nought may endure but Mutability"--or of a memorable

passage in "Mont Blanc": "All things that move and breathe with toil 1 s and sound/Are bom and die, revolve, subside, and swell."1-'

Practically nothing escapes time’s scythe in Collected Poems, and Hardy’s "Memory and I" is a good Index to time’s victims:

"0 Memory, where is now my youth, Who used to say that life was truth?"

"I saw him in a crumbled cot Beneath a tottering tree; That he as phantom lingers there Is only known to me."

”0 Memory, where is now my joy, Who lived with me in sweet employ?"

”1 saw him in gaunt gardens lone, Where laughter used to be; That he as phantom wanders there Is known to none but me."

”0 Memory, where is now my hope, Who charged with deeds my skill and scope?"

"I saw her in a tomb of tomes, - Where dreams are wont to be; That she as spectre haunteth there Is only known to me."

"0 Memory, where is now my faith, One time a champion, now a wraith?"

"I saw her In a ravaged aisle, Bowed down on bended knee; That her poor ghost outflickers there Is known to none but me."

15 "Mont Blanc," 11. 94-95 51

•'0 Memory, where is now my love, That rayed me as a god above?"

"I saw her in an ageing shape Where beauty used to be; That her fond phantom lingers there Is only known to me." (CP, 170-171)

This poem provides an obituary to time’s casualties. Each of time’s

victims--"youth," "joy," "hope," "faith," and "love"--is introduced

in a couplet more abstract than concrete. The quatrains that follow each of the couplets contain emblematic accounts of the demise of these qualities. The concreteness of the quatrains is an appropriate

foil to the abstractness of the couplets. As has been suggested earlier in this study, "joy" is nearly always associated with "youth"

in Collected Poems, and It will be useful to consider both of these victims of time together, In a later part of this chapter. The demise of "faith," "hope," and "love," however, can be treated separately.

As Harvey Curtis Webster carefully establishes, Hardy’s youth reveals little evidence that he was anything but a devout young Anglican.

In Stlnsford, Hardy faithfully attended services, conducted Sunday school classes when he was fifteen, and thought seriously about entering the ministry until his mid-twenties. As Webster suggests, "there can be no doubt that Hardy grew into a convinced Anglican.Evidence points to his belief in the existence of a loving God. To quote Webster again: He believed "that a personal and just God who was profoundly interested in the fate of human beings ruled the universe. He believed

l^Webster, pp. 18-20 52

that the world and life were good; he was hopeful rather than gloomy."!?

But with maturity came anxiety and doubt, nowhere revealed more poig­

nantly than in his well-known poem, "The Oxen":

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. "Now they are all on their knees," An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave In these years 1 Yet, I feel, If someone said on Christmas Eve, "Come; see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know," I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so. (CP, 439)

The first half of the poem presents simply the faith of a youth to whom skepticism was alien: "Nor did it occur to one of us there/To doubt they were kneeling then." But time has eroded this idyllic faith, not only his, but the faith of his whole generation:

"So fair a fancy few would weave/ln these years!" Even the con­ clusion of the poem, with its assertion of the speaker’s willingness to go see the oxen again some Christmas Eve, cannot erase his gnawing doubts. In the first place, he would go "hoping" to find the oxen kneeling; as a younger man he knew they would kneel, a much more af­ firmative and convicted attitude than wishfulness. In the second

17Ibid., p. 26. 53

place, the reader shares with the speaker the lingering suspicion

that no one will in fact come to invite him to see the oxen--the

"gloom” of the last stanza seems too apparent.

What separates childhood faith from adult questioning and dis­

belief is, of course, the growing ability to examine and question

one’s certainties as one matures. Douglas Bush sees the influence

of Mill, Darwin and Spencer in the formulation of Hardy’s "intellec­

tual skepticism."18 Hardy is no different from Tennyson and Arnold

in this respect, or from Hopkins or Clough. The sequence from belief

to disbelief is a familiar one in Victorian poetry, and has become

a cliche with modem writers. Hardy’s "Afternoon Service at Wellstock"

captures again his drifting away from his religious convictions:

On afternoons of drowsy calm We stood in the panelled pew, Singing one-voiced a Tate-and-Brady psalm To the tune of "Cambridge New."

We watched the elms, we watched the rooks, The clouds upon the breeze, Between the whiles of glancing at our books, And swaying like the trees.

- So mindless were those outpourings!-- Though I am not aware That I have gained by subtle thought on things Since we stood psalming there. (CP, 403)

The imagery of the first two stanzas betrays the emptiness of this period of religious feeling. The "drowsy calm" of the setting is matched perfectly by the drowsiness of conviction. The battle between attention to prayer and the distractions of the afternoon

^Douglas Bush, English Poetry (1952; Galaxy edition, 1963), p. 187. 54

is easily won by the latter: the congregation’s concentration is

broken by glances at "the elms," and "rooks," and the "clouds upon

the breeze." Things are too serene here, and the setting Is more

soporific than spiritual. "Like the trees" swaying in the wind, the congregation is lulled into stupefaction by their intonation of "a

Tate-and-BracIy psalm" and by the seductive beauty of an open win­ dow. One reads this and is impressed by the empty motions of the ritual, and thus is not surprised by the sudden exclamation at the beginning of the third stanza: "So mindless were those outpourings!"

But the poem is rescued from the brink of triteness by the final three lines. Despite his recognition that "psalming" is not real faith, the speaker must admit that "subtle thought" which has replaced ritual has been no more satisfactory. And if one can judge by the imagery, his earlier faith was easier to live with than his more mature specu­ lations. As McDowall has observed, a "nostalgia for a lost or im­ possible faith" is characteristic of Hardy’s few poems that deal with religious belief. The "saddened sense of time" that F. L. Lucas, among several other students of Hardy, discovers in the poetry becomes even more meaningful when considered in light of these poems about lost faith. Time is the instrument of man’s separation from happier days, and the hiatus can be bridged only by memories.

19Arthur McDowall, Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study (London, 1931), p. 28.

, F. L. Lucas, Ten Victorian Poets (Cambridge, 1940), p. 186. 55

Numerous poems by Hardy can be cited as evidence of his dimming

hopes. Nearly all of the work discussed in this study contains proof

of this, if not explicitly articulated, at least implicitly. "The

Oxdn", for example, while more obviously concerned with waning or

lost faith, is at least obliquely involved with the loss of hcpe--"I

should go with him. . ./Hoping it might be so." Clearly, the revival of hope is conditioned upon the speaker’s being invited to witness the Christmas Eve drama, a condition it was suggested earlier, that

is not likely to be met. And one might argue plausibly that in those peems where Hardy is revealing his nostalgic response to the fact of vanished bliss, he is premising all of this on the understood as­ sumption that bliss was accompanied by the hope of its continuance.

The reality of the matter is, however, that neither the bliss nor the hope of its continuance is justified by the inevitable outcome. But there are a few poems where Hardy treats hope explicitly, and some of them ought to be cited here.

"St. Launce’s Revisited" (CP, 335-336) is typical. Here the speaker visits again the inn he knew years ago when he was in the

"prime." But everything is changed: the "groom and jade" he once knew "moulder"; the "tavern-holder" and the "tap-maid" are "strangei"

Saddened by the differences between memory and reality, the speaker asks plaintively: "why is it/Not as on my visit/When hope and I were twin?" The poem concludes with the assertion that this nostalgic recreation of the past is "waste thought" since these people are all dead, "vanished/Under earth; yea, banished/Ever into nought." 56

••At Waking" (CP, 208-209), like "In the Night She Came"

dealt with earlier, is a premonition poemj ,to coin a term that is

needed in studying Hardy. Typically, the speaker is in bed bedide his

beloved when he is struck by a vision of her minus her physical beauty

and uniqueness. The poem usually closes with an expression of horror

or disbelief, or a half-hearted restatement of his undying affection.

"At Waking" opens at dawn, with its light casting the speaker’s beloved

in unflattering shades: she is seen in "bare/Hard lines," robbed of

"her old endowment"; instead of being moved by her uniquenss, he is horrified to see her as "one/Of the common crowd," "lit up by no ample/

Enrichments of mien or mind." Hope enters in the final stanza where he exposes the dimension of the tragedy--she was the sole cause of hope

in him:

0 vision appalling When the one believed-in thing Is seen falling, falling, With all to which hope can cling. Off: it is not true; For it cannot be That the prize I drew Is a blank to me! (CP, 208-209)

"Just the Same" is another revelation of Hardy’s waning hopes, and provides an interesting contrast to the preceding poem:

I sat. It all was past; Hope never would hail again; Fair days had ceased at a blast, The world was a darkened den.

The beauty and dream were gone, And the halo in which I had hied So gaily gallantly on Had suffered blot and died! 57

I went forth, heedless whither, In a cloud too black for name: --People frisked hither and thither; The world was just the same. (CP, 649)

Read as a sequel to "At Waking," "Just The Same" may be said to deal with the fact of vanished hope and bliss, while the other deals with the premonition of it. The former poem catches the speaker as he gets a glimpse of the way things might become, while the latter shows him reflecting on the way things have become. In the one, time is a threat; in the other, a victor. The loss of hope he feared in the former has become In "Just The Same" a reality—"It all was past;/

Hope never would hall again." The plainness revealed to him by the cruel rays of dawn in "At Waking" have become an historical event to the persona in the other poem--"The beauty and dream were gone."

Significant, too, is the difference in ton® of the final stanzas.

The one is bombastic and defiant: "Off: it is not true;/For it can­ not be/That the prize I drew/ls a blank to me J" The conclusion of

"Just The Same" reveals the speaker as chastened and resigned, too depressed to be defiant: "I went forth, heedless whither,/in a cloud too black for name." The opening line of this poem--"I sat. It was all past"—expresses clearly and poignantly the speaker’s awareness of time’s destructiveness, and can be read as a summary of this major theme that appears throughout Hardy’s Collected Poems

The excellence of Hardy’s love lyrics has not gone unnoticed by his readers. G. M. Young, for example, has called Hardy’s "some 58

21 of the most poignant love-poems in our language." To Albert

Guerard, "the love poems, and poems of loneliness and deprivation

and regret, constitute one of the purest, least pretentious, and 22 saddest bodies of writing in English." C. Day Lewis claims Hardy 23 has written "some of the finest love poetry in our language."

Carl Weber, a scholar to whom all students of Thomas Hardy are

deeply indebted, places the "Poems of 1912-13« third in greatness

among love poems in English, after Shakespeare’s and Elizabeth Barrett o / Browning’s sonnets." Hardy’s, Weber claims, contain a distinction not possessed by the other two authors; his "provide a complete sum­ mary of his adult life in a way that neither Shakespeare's nor Mrs. 25 Browning’s attempt,," One finds in them a wide range of emotional attitudes: "from first sight of the loved one, through courtship, to marriage, to quarrel, to staled familiarity, to disillusion, to bitterness and ’division,' and finally to death, and thereafter to self-examination, remorse, expiation, and the rebirth of love."

The best advice one can offer towards an understanding of the love poems is, read Carl Weber's splendid volume. No attempt will be

21Young, p. 265.

22Albert J. Guerard, "The Illusion of Simplicity: The Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy," Sewanee Rev., LXXII (1964), 377.

2^c. Day Lewis, "The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy," Proceedings of The British Academy, XXXVII (1951), 167.

2^Carl J. Weber, Hardy’s Love Poems (London and New York, 1963), p. v.

25Ibid., p. vil.

26Ibid 59

made here to summarize its contents, but within its pages the reader

will find the 120 poems written about Hardy’s love for Emma Lavinia

Gifford accompanied by a mine of relevant biographical information.

But what needs to be done here, Weber notwithstanding, is to examine

some of these poems for traces of the villainy of time.

Mrs. Hardy died on November 27, 1912, after thirty-eight years of marriage. Their union was not always idyllic, as anyone familiar

with their life knows, and the sincerity and poignancy of the poems written about her following her death are surprising in view of their often bitter relationship. To quote again from Weber: "no one could have foreseen what actually happened. Once the source of Hardy’s un­ happiness at Max Gate was removed by the hand of death, his heart re­ acted by the production of some the the tenderest poetry he had ever written."22

The pattern seen earlier in this chapter, of a concrete place or event functioning as a prod to Hardy’s memory, can be observed at work in several of his poems dealing with his love for the first Mrs.

Hardy. "Under the Waterfall" (CP, 315-17) is representative. As Weber established in Hardy♦s Love Poems, the central incident occurred on

August 19, 1870, when Hardy and Miss Gifford were picnicking near no Bocastle Harbour, in Cornwall. ° After placing "our basket of fruit and wine/By the runlet’s rim" (CP, 316), they dipped a glass into the

27Ibld., p. 67.

28lbld., pp. 16-17. 60

rushing waters and drank together. But as Hardy "lieId the vessel to

rinse in the fall," it "slipped, and sank, and was past recall." For a while, the two of them searched with bared arms in the stream for the glass, but finally abandoned the task and left the scene. From that time on:

"Whenever I plunge my arm, like this, In a basin of water, I never miss The sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day Fetched back from Its thickening shroud of gray."

It is this recaptured moment of joy torn from the past and placed Into the bleary present that gives Hardy’s love lyrics their characteristic poignancy. Time has erased the actual incidents of happiness, but not their recollection, and the ironic juxtaposition of the past with the present is typical of Hardy’s nostalgic and re­ flective poems about love.

"The Marble-Streeted Town" (CP, 644), identified as Plymouth at the end of the poem, Is also In this vein. On a visit to the town, the setting years ago of Idyllic experiences, the speaker sees "The movement up and down" of the tides, "as when she was there." The same foreign ships "come and go"; the "bandsmen" still "boom in the sun/A throbbing waltz"; children still "laugh along the Hoe/As when she was one." Nothing in Plymouth has changed; the town seems impervious to the effect of time. Against this constancy of setting, the shattering absence of his beloved is both ironic and tragic. Plymouth "seems not to mind" that she "the brightest of its native souls" is no longer pre­ sent. Despite the wealth of memories he has of her, "none here knows her history--/Has heard her name." Although the setting itself seems 61 unchanged, the brightest feature of it has been swept away by the passing of years, so thoroughly, in fact, that not even a memory of her lingers in "the marble-streeted town." Like an unwitting monument, the marble streets intensify his loss. Sometime soon after his wife’s death in November, 1912, Hardy discovered a locket given to him by her in 1870 which contained some locks of her hair.2^ The poem "On A Discovered Curl of Hair" was prompted by that discovery. In it, he recalls the past when "this curl was waving on your head" (CP, 632). The curl had "sported in the sun and wind," and "brushed and clung about my face." Finally, "to abate the misery/Of absentness, you gave it me." The second stanza opens with a reflection on the death of the woman who surrendered the lock:

' Where are its fellows now? Ah, they For brightest brown have donned a gray. And gone into a cavemed ark, Ever unopened, always dark!

From the unhappy present, through memory to the happy past, and back to the present with a deeper awareness of his loss--this is the move­ ment of this poem, and of many Hardy love lyrics. The final six lines focus again on the hair In the locket, and reveal the poet’s heart yearning for reunion with the dead woman:

Yet this one curl, untouched of time, Beams with live brown as in its prime, So that it seems I even could now Restore it to the living brow By bearing down the western road , Till I had reached your old abode. (CP, 633)

29Ibld., p. 81. 62

The lock, unlike the woman who owned it, is unscarred by time, and

momentarily deludes the poet into thinking he might find her still

living and youthful in her ’’old abode.” Without being told directly,

the reader senses well the depths of frustration the speaker is about

to fall into: the woman is dead, and no amount of wishing can erase

that fact. Memories are only temporary anodynes for bereavement;

when one returns to reality he is not happier; he is more acutely sad.

Hardy wrote several poems in the year after his wife’s death,

and among the most mournful of them is ’’This Summer and Last.*' Here

It is a whole season that prompts the sad recollections: without his

beloved, summer’s abundance seems meaningless:

Unhappy summer you, Who do not see What your yester-summer sawl Never, never, will you be Its match to me, Never, never draw Smiles your forerunner drew, Know what it knewl (CP, 787)

Those earlier, happier summers saw the sunshine creeping "Into corn-

brown curls," and the "breezes heard a humorous wit/Of fancy flit."

But despite the sameness of seasonal attractions, the death of Mrs.

Hardy has dimmed forever the poet’s response to those features. In

contrast to the joyful summers of the past, the present and the future hold no such promise, and will "never draw/Smiles your forerunner drew,/Know what it knew!" Time and its inevitable handmaiden, death, have robbed the poet of joy. 63

Another clear illustration of this phenomenon Is provided by

"Paths of Former Time" (CP, 496). Here again Hardy contrasts the

unchanged natural scene with his own emotional transformations brought

about by the death of his wife. The cattle still "moo/ln the meadows

we used to wander through”; the streams Still "curl/Towards the weirs

with a musical swirl"; "Haymakers" still "Rake rolls into heaps"; and

wagon wheels "crack/On the turfy track," When the question is asked,

"’Why then shun ... All this because of the lack of one?’" Hardy

answers simply:

Had you been Sharer £f)that scene You would not ask while it bites in keen

Why it is so We can no more go By the summer paths we used to know! (CP, 496)

Far from consoling him, the seasonal associations with his wife serve

only to intensify the poet’s present loneliness, and make him incap­

able of responding now, as he could then, to the delights of nature.

One can readily agree with DUffin who has seen "the exquisite pain of

loss" as one the characteristic emotions in Hardy’s love poetry.30

Other critics have been less perceptive in dealing with the

love lyrics. V. H. Collins, for example, has written that the "pre-

dominant note" of the love poems is "dissatisfaction, regret, unhap-

piness." While superficially suasive, this judgment misses the

30h. C. Duffin, Thomas Hardy (Manchester, 1957; reprinted 1962), p. 296.

*5 1 V. H. Collins, "The Love Poetry of Thomas Hardy," Essays and Studies by Members of The English Association, XXVIII (1942), 74. 64

whole point of the poetry. One must guard constantly against making

the world of the present loom too large in Hardy’s mind. The present

Is regretful, but the reason for the special poignancy of the regret

is that the past was intensely happy. It is simply not true to hear

in Hardy’s poems about his first wife a "predominant note" of "dissat­

isfaction." One must always recall the bygone world as one witnesses

the unhappy present of 1912-1913. After her death, Hardy was given to

idealize his years with Emma, and the poems he wrote testify to this.

Because they were so happy once, he is deeply saddened now.

"On the Doorstep," written in 1914, clearly illustrates this happy past vs. present pain contrast:

The rain imprinted the step’s wet shine With target-circles that quivered and crossed As I was leaving this porch of mine; When from within there swelled and paused A song’s sweet note; And back I turned, and thought, "Here I’ll abide."

The step shines wet beneath the rain, Which prints its circles as heretofore: I watch them from the porch again, But no song-notes within the door Now call to me To shun the dripping lea; Arid forth I stride. (CP, 494)

What is distressing to Hardy here and elsewhere is not the pain of

"No song-notes within the door" call him; the voice has been stilled by death. Where once he paused / and entered the house to escape the rain, he now walks out Into it.

The poem is not about "regret" or "dissatisfaction"; it is, rather, about the inevitable triumph of time over human values--even love 65

succumbs to its stroke, at least In a great many of Hardy’s poems

written after the death of his wife.

Four months after her death, Hardy wrote a poem recalling as Incident that took place 33 years earlier, on a trip to Bocastle.^2

At that time, accompanied by Miss Gifford whom he had just met at the

rectory of St. Juliot Church--she was the rector’s sister-in-law—

and by the rector’s wife, Mrs. Caddell Holder, the trio set out to

examine some slate quarries of interest to the young architect, since

he was there to discuss plans for the church tower. As Weber recon­

structs the episode, "On the drive back from Bocastle, the road proved

too steep in one place for the carriage with three passengers. Hardy

and Miss Gifford ’alighted to ease the sturdy pony’s load.’ Leaving Mrs. Holder to drive the chaise up the hill, the other two walked."33

The poem, "At Castle Boterel," is about this excursion.

The poem opens with the speaker revisiting this scene, "the junc­

tion of lane and highway" (CP, 330-331). He looks "behind at the fading

byway," and there imagines he sees "on Its slope, now glistening wet . .

Myself and a girlish form benighted." They climb from the wagon "To

ease the sturdy pony’s load/When he sighed and slowed" and together they "climb the road/Beside a chaise." As he reveals in the poem,

"What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of/Matters not much, nor to what it led." Nothing about this experience Is made explicit except its brevity--"It filled but a minute"--and its intensity—"was

32weber, pp. 9-11. 33Ibld., p. 11. 66

there ever/A time of such quality, since or before,/in that hill’s

story?" But since it was the first time the young poet-architect and Miss Gifford had been alone in their brief span of acquaintance,

it seems obvious that they were experiencing the flush of first love.

The final stanzas are highly skillful:

Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border, And much have they faced there, first and last, Of the transitory in Earth’s long order; But what they record in colour and cast Is~-that we two passed.

And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour, In mindless rote, has ruled from sight The substance now, one phantom figure Remains on the slope, as when that night Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking, I look back at it amid the rain For the very last time; for my sand is sinking, And I shall traverse old love’s domain Never again. (CP, 331)

The poignancy of this brief emotion occurs within a timeless and enduring context, among "Primaeval rocks" that have outlasted much of "the transitory in Earth’s long order." And despite their exposure to countless other incidents, the rocks "record" forever the passing of this young couple. As the next stanza reveals, although "Time’s unflinching rigour" has blotted out "The substance"--the woman is dead now--her presence lingers there, like a "phantom," "as when that night/

Saw us alight." But the bereaved speaker is conscious of his own transi- toriness--"My sand is sinking"--and as the vision grows smaller against the sunset, he realizes he has seen it "For the very last time," and

"shall traverse old love’s domain/Never again." 67

Hardy’s love lyrics may be considered elegiac. As in all elegies, the central mood is established within the poem by the con­ trast between the happy past recalled by the narrator and the unhappy present of the poem itself. As has been seen already, the memory of the narrator is frequently jarred by confrontation with an incident or place which he has associated with the past and his life with the person he now mourns. Brown is quite perceptive in his discovery in these poems of "a unique quality of elegiac feeling responsive to the poignancy of Incident returning unsought upon the unguarded memory, and released through dramatic fantasy.Hardy’s "The Going," which relates the suddenness of his wife’s death, provides an excellent il­ lustration of these characteristics, particularly in the third stanza: the poem is the first of the "1912-1913" poems, and according to the date that accompanies it in Collected Poems, it was written within a month of Mrs. Hardy’s death:

Why do you make me leave the house And think for a breath it is you I see At the end of the alley of bending boughs Where so often at dusk you used to be; _ Till in darkening dankness The yawning blankness Of the perspective sickens me! (CP, 318)

This "alley of bending boughs" appeared often in poems Hardy wrote about his late wife. Its form varies from poem to poem, but the function is the same: a setting for a fanciful recollection of her, from which he emerges with a keener awareness of his loss.

^Douglas Brown, Thomas Hardy (London, 1954), p. 152. 68

The present of the poera becomes "darkening dankness," and the new

realization of isolation is a "perspective" that "sickens me J"

These attitudes are not as representative of love poems written be­

fore the death of Mrs. Hardy. In them, the present looms larger in

his consciousness, and usually he is writing about the disappointment

of his present relationship with her. But after her death, he often

forgot the harshness of reality, and tended to idealize a relation­

ship that had been, from all available evidence, something less than

idyllic. And in these pieces, the influence of time can be seen In

unyielding operation, both as the harbinger of death as well as the

instrument of division between the poet’s present and the highly

stylized past his fancy creates.

For Hardy, the youthful past is nearly always synonymous with

joy» a j°y heightened in intensity by its contrast with the normally bleary present. Characteristically, poems like this open with a plea­

sant memory which is followed by observations of an unpleasant present.

"The House of Hospitalities" is typical. The poem opens with an idyllic recollection: "Here we broached the Christmas barrel,/

Pushed up the charred log-ends/Here we sang the Christmas carol,/And called in friends." But again the villain is time, and his painful etchings are revealed in the following stanzas: "Time has tired me since we met here . . The fourth stanza contrasts sharply with the first: "Now no Christmas brings in neighbours,/And the New

Year comes unlit;/Where we sang the mole now labours,/And spiders knit"

(CP, 192). 69

"The Voice of Things" (CP, 401-402) follows the same pattern.

The poem opens with the speaker’s recollection of a happier time

"forty Augusts--. . . ago,/When I paced the headlands loosed from

dull employ." At that time, before "thwarts had flung their toils

in front of me," he heard the sounds of the waves "In the sway of an

all-including joy/Without cloy." Now, however, he hears in the waves

"a long ironic laughter/At the lot of men, and all the vapoury/Things

that be."

Likewise in "I Was the Midmost" (CP, 630), the speaker recalls

a time "When first I frisked me free." But time has intervened:

"Where now is midmost in my world?/I trace it not at all." He only

hears "wistful voices call/’We are faini We are faint* from everywhere/

On Earth’s bewildering ball J" In the flush of youthful love in "John

and Jane" (CP, 193), the couple "find the world a pleasant place/Where

all is ecstasy and grace,/Where a light has risen that cannot wane."

But as the years pass, misfortunes multiply until "They rate the world as a gruesome place,/Where fair looks fade to a skull’s grimace,--/As a pilgrimage they would fain get done--/Do John and Jane with their worthless son." In "Former Beauties" (CP, 223), the speaker sees a group of "market-dames, mid-aged, with lips thin-drawn,/And tissues sere." His memory is jogged, and he wonders If "these (are) the musllned pink young things to whom/We vowed and swore/In nooks on summer Sun­ days by the Froom,/0r Budmouth shore?" In "A Sunday Morning Tragedy"

(CP, 188), the narrator describes his daughter as "flower-fair"; but her life is marked by unhappiness, and the poem ends with her death:

"There she lay--silent, breathless, dead." And In a poignant line, 70 the change is clearly revealed: "Ghost-white the cheeks once rosy- red. "

In "Where the Picnic Was" (CP, 336), the normal reference to an Indefinite span of years is condensed into one year, and the re­ sult is quite effective. The poem opens with the speaker revisiting the scene of last year’s picnic: "Where we made the fire/ln the sum­ mer time/Of branch and briar." This time, though, "a cold wind blows./

And the grass is gray." And the speaker reveals the changes a year has made: "two have wandered far/From this grassy rise/Into urban roar/Where no picnics are,/And one--has shut her eyes/For evermore."

In "He Fears His Good Fortune" (CP, 479), Hardy again harkens back to "a glorious time/At an epoch of my prime;/Mornings beryl-bespread/

And evenings golden-red/Nothing gray." But throughout it all, he was bothered by a gnawing suspicion that things were too serene: "’It Is too full for me,/Too rare . . ./Its spell must close with a crash/Some dayi*" His premonitions were proven true eventually: "’let the end foreseen/Come dulyJ--I am serene.’/--And it came."

Examples like this can be cited endlessly from the Collected

Poems. But the pattern is basically the same: from joy, through time, to unhappiness. This is not to say Hardy wrote no other type of poem, but this is a characteristic type.

Hardy’s focus was not always on the past and the present; some­ times he wrote of the future, time-yet-to-come, and one can find in some of these pieces as well numerous instances of Hardy’s dim view. "’By the Runic Stone’" provides a good introduction to this type of verse, 71

not only because of its explicit indictment of time, but because

it shows traces of Hardy’s fondness for abstraction integrated with

concreteness:

By the Runic Stone They sat, where the grass sloped down, And chattered, he white-hatted, she in brown, Pink-faced, breeze-blown.

Rapt there alone In the transport of talking so In such a place, there was nothing to let them know What hours had flown.

And the die thrown By them heedlessly there, the dent It was to cut in their encompassment, Were, too, unknown.

It might have strown Their zest with qualms to see, As in a glass, Time toss their history From zone to zone I (CP, 442)

The first stanza is constructed around clear images: the grass

"sloped down"; his hat is "white," she is wearing "brown"; their faces are "pink," a color arising from the fact that they are "breeze-blown," as well as under the influence of first love, and therefore emotionally flushed. The "Runic Stone" near which they sit links their situation with past ages, and lifts the poem from the class of private love lyrics and places it with what might be called cosmic love lyrics: the poem seems to be about lovers in general, not simply these two lovers. In the second stanza, the couple is seen so engrossed with each other that they lose track of time: "there was nothing to let them know/What hours had flown." This seems at first reading to be little more than x a four-line restatement of a familiar cliche to young lovers, but it 72

serves as well to show the intensity of love temporarily transcending

time. While they are totally involved with each other, time seems ir­

relevant to them. But the second half of the poem clearly establishes

the fragility of this victory. Even while they are "rapt there alone/

In the transport of talking," their future is being determined; this

experience was already making a "dent" in their "encompassment." The

final stanza differs sharply from the first: it is colorless, largely devoid of concrete images, and somber. In contrast to the "pink­

faced" ecstasy of the present, "time" Is at work to dim this: if they could see "Time toss their history/From zone to zone," their love would probably be less intense. Viewed from the future, the happiness of the present Is hollow indeed. One thinks of Hardy’s familiar poem about the sinking of the Titanic in this context. Even as the ship was being outfitted for its maiden voyage, the iceberg was being formed and prepared for its calamitous meeting with it. Throughout Collected Poems, icebergs appear under various guises when Hardy directs his at­ tention to the future. In another poem built around premonitions of unhappiness to young lovers, "Plena Timoris" (CP, 706-707), the pattern is repeated. Here the couple Is leaning against the "parapet stone," watching the moon "in its southings." The mood in this first stanza is light-hearted: "her ear-rings twinkled; her teeth, too, shone/As, his arm around her, they laughed and leant." But the middle two stanzas relate an inci­ dent that causes the mood to shift dramatically. A man walks up to the couple and reports the suicide of a woman who "Drowned herself 73

for love of a man," having grown weary of waiting for a reunion with him. The final remark of the man who reports the tragedy is general in its application, and, as in the preceding poem, the piece assumes general significance: "’So much for love In this mortal sphere!

The final stanza, with its grim anxiety about the future of their union, is a perfect contrast to the first:

The girl’s heart shuddered; it seemed as to freeze her That here, at their tryst for so many a day, Another woman’s tragedy lay. Dim dreads of the future grew slowly to seize her, And her arm dropt from his as they wandered away. (CP, 707)

The literal meaning, clear as always in Hardy’s poems, is complemented by the subtle references to the couple’s interlocking arms in the first and last stanzas. In the former, with its easy optimism and effortless affection, the reference to "his arm around her" reinforces the mood in clear imagery: what counts is the present moment, where they are united.

But after the stranger pries their attention away from each other, and, through the tragic account of the woman who drowned herself for love, directs them to thoughts of the future, their union seems less certain.

As they "wandered away," it Is appropriate that "her arm dropt from his." The present tense of young love is pleasant and heady, Hardy seems to say here and elsewhere, but the future is another story alto­ gether. As the singer of "In the Street" says so clearly, "we wend our ways,/Beautiful girl,/Along our parallel days;/While unfurl/Our futures, and what there may whelm and whirl" (CP, 709).

Besides the assault on love, the future promises to assault life itself. "The Sexton at Longpuddle," though not the best of Hardy’s 74

poems, is nonetheless typical of a large number of verses that deal

with the imminence of death:

He passes down the churchyard track On his way to toll the bell; And stops, and looks at the graves around, And notes each finished and greening mound Complacently, As their shaper he, And one who can do it well. And, with a prosperous sense of his doing, Thinks he’ll not lack Plenty such work In the long ensuing Futurity. For people will always die, And he will always be nigh To shape their cell. (CP, 744)

The irony of the piece is striking. Not even daily preoccupation

with the reminders of human mortality, bells and graves, can lead

the sexton into the meaning for him of all this--that he too will die,

and become the reason for one more "greening mound," What he sees in

"the long ensuing/Futurity" is more business, and he is right: "he’ll

not lack/plenty such work . . and "people will always die." But

his final thoughts reveal his blindness: he will not "always be nigh/

To shape their cell." He will himself, like all the rest, be dead one

day.

A good deal of critical attention has been directed at Hardy’s

attitude toward nature, and it will be the burden of the next few pages

to suggest that his response to it should not be separated from his

sensitivity to the motion of time.

All discussions of nineteenth century thought on nature must begin with Joseph Warren Beach’s masterful work, The Concept of Nature 75 in Nineteenth Century English Poetry. Beach suggests there that 'Hardy heralds the disappearance from English poetry of nature with a capital

N.” Hardy, Beach continues:

denies the benevolence of nature conceived as the unity of things personified or as the sura of natural laws. And since he has no religious power, like Tennyson’s God, to set up in contrast to nature, as a guarantee of happiness for spiritual beings, nothing is left in him of the optimistic Weltansicht characteristic of the palmy days of nature-poetry.33 —

In a particularly Incisive observation, Beach finds a corre­ spondence between Hardy’s gloomy point of view and the Imagery of his nature poems: "the gentle, the sublime, the luxuriant, the cheerful aspects of nature have largely given place to the severe, the sombre, the meagre." ° Hardy, in sum, "appears to have a natural preference in taste for aspects of nature which reflect the modified gloom of his intellectual outlook.The key ingredient of Hardy’s "gloom," I his awareness of time’s inexorability, figures prominently in many of these poems.

The best introduction to Hardy’s treatment of nature is the poem, "To Outer Nature." The first three stanzas recount the speaker’s bygone identification with the apparent beauty and serenity of nature, when "Love alone had wrought thee-- . . ./For my pleasure,/Planned thee as a measure/For expounding/And resounding/Glad things that men treasure" (CP, 54). With the unhappy realization that time has eroded

35jOseph Warren Beach, The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (New York, 1956), p. 503.

36Ibld., p. 505.

37Ibld., p. 506. 76

his earlier buoyancy, and along with it his sense of kinship with his

surroundings, the speaker asks plaintively "for but a moment/Of that

old endowment," when he was able to see nautre’s "dally/lris-hued

embowmentl" The following stanzas show the reason for this dimming of vision:

But such re-adorning Time forbids with scorning— Makes me see things Cease to be things They were in my morning.

Fad’st thou, glow-forsaken, Darkness-overtaken! Thy first sweetness, Radiance, meetness, None shall re-awaken. (CP, 54)

As always, the villainy of time is painfully evident: with the passage of years, and the cloying of youthful aspirations, comes a whole new perspective. In his happy youth, the "sweetness" and "radiance" of nature struck him; but now, as an older, wearied person, nature has faded, "Darkness-overtaken!" Where once he saw the beauty of nature, now he sees It faded.

' This relationship between the natural setting and the mood of the speaker is repeated in "The Seasons of Her Year," and given a dif­ ferent twist.

Winter is white on turf and tree, And birds are fled; But summer songsters pipe to me, And petals spread, For what I dreamt of secretly His lips have said! 77

0 ’tis a fine May iaoin, they say, And blooms have blown; But wild and wintry is my day, My song-birds moan; For he who vowed leaves me to pay Alone--alonei (CP, 143)

Here the mood of the speaker in each stanza is opposite the mood

normally associated with the season in which it takes place. The

first stanza is set in winter, normally linked with barrenness and

gloom. But the dominant emotion of these lines is idyllic, hopeful, one of "summer songsters" and spreading petals. The reason is given

in the fifth and sixth lines--her lover has admitted his love. In

the second stanza, the seasonal setting is now May, but the mood has shifted from joy to gloom: "wild and wintry is my day." And the reason--her lover has deserted her. Here the element of time is im­ plied rather than stated, but the heavy emphasis on the changing sea­ sons as a framework for a shift in emotion makes it clear that time’s influence is surely, if subtly, felt.

This polarity between the emotion and the setting is the ex­ ception, not the rule, in Collected Poems. More typical is a cor­ respondence between them, as found in "An Anniversary." Here the speaker revisits the scene of earlier, happier moments, and finds people walking "the same path," interrupted by "the same stile"; he also sees "the same green hillock and hollow," and "the same horizon."

As the final line of stanza one reveals, he is "the same man ... who pilgrimed here that day" (CP, 441-442). The second stanza shifts sharply from sameness to the more apparent differences: 78

Let so much be said of the date-day’s sameness; But the tree that neighbours the track And stoops like a pedlar afflicted with lameness, Knew of no sogged wound or wind-crack. And the joints of that wall were not enshrouded With mosses of many tones, And the garth up afar was not overcrowded With a multitude of white stones, And the man’s eyes then were not so sunk that you saw the socket-bones. (CP, 442)

The dismissal in the first line of the similarities pointed out

In the preceding stanza, "Let so much be said of the date-day’s same­ ness," introduces the reader to a series of depressing observations on the natural setting. The tree now "stoops like a pedlar afflicted with lameness"; the wall is "enshrouded/With mosses of many tones"; and the garden is "overcrowded" with stones. These evidences of age and decay become perfect mirrors of the same processes at work within the speaker. Like them, he has felt the ravages of time, as the final line makes explicit--"And the man’s eyes then were not so sunk that you saw the socket-bones." The word "then" repeats the central contrast in the poem, between the happier, distant past and the changed, eroded present. As in many other Hardy poems, the chief preoccupation is with the snares of time, whose destructiveness is extended to the world of nature.

"At Middle-Field Gate In February" reveals the same concern with the transformations of time set in an appropriately altered natural setting 79

The bars are thick with drops that show As they gather themselves from the fog Like silver buttons ranged in a row, And as evenly spaced as if measured, although They fall at the feeblest jog.

They load the leafless hedge hard by, And the blades of last year’s grass. While the fallow ploughland turned up nigh In raw rolls, clammy and clogging lie--- Too clogging for feet to pass.

How dry it was on a far-back day When straws hung the hedge and around, When amid the sheaves in amorous play In curtained bonnets and light array Bloomed a bevy now underground! (CP, 451)

Unlike "An Anniversary" which moved from past to present, this piece

begins with a close look at the present and closes with a glance back­

wards. The setting of the poem, a heavy, wet, enveloping fog, pro­

vides a fitting atmosphere for reflections on life and death. The

fragility of the water droplets on the fence, that "fall at the

feeblest jog," parallels the precarious state of human existence.

The fog itself, long a symbol of the unknown, is the source of these drops, and conveys well Hardy’s frequent bafflement at the cycle of

life. In the second stanza, the "fallow ploughland" that lies in

•’raw rolls, clammy and clogging," reinforces the notion of barrenness and death, and prepares the reader for the inevitable observation a few lines later that the wearers of "curtained bonnets" who once en­ gaged in "amorous play" are "now underground!" The "sheaves" of the past, symbolic of abundance and life, have been replaced with the barren, "clammy" earth of the present. Once again, the natural setting reinforces the central mood of the poem. 80

"Log On the Hearth," written for "A Memory of a Sister" (CP,

459-460), contains constant interplay between past and. present. The

log burning on the hearth came from the apple tree the speaker and his

sister used to climb before age and disease destroyed its fruit. This

sight prompts his memory to recall the pleasant days of their youth

when "her foot near mine on the bending limb,/Laughing, her young

brown hand awave" they played together in Its branches. Again, Images

of abundance and barrenness are juxtaposed, reminding the reader of

the inevitableness of death: the tree "bloomed and bore striped apples

by the peck/Till its last hour of bearing knelled"; the "fork that

first my hand would reach/And then my foot ... lies now/Sawn, sapless, darkening with soot." Human life and nature are equally subject to

the destruction of time. Only the charred embers remain of the tree; only a memory of his sister "Laughing, her young brown hand awave,"

survives the grave.

Although not really a nature poem, Hardy’s "The Ageing House"

follows a pattern similar to "Logs On the Hearth." The first stanza

is about the past, the second about the present, and in each case the central emotion is mirrored emblematically by the imagery. The opening stanza reconstructs a distant past, when the house bore fresh paint, and "A fresh fair head/Wduld often lean/From the sunny casement," while the breezes "spoke ... to the little sycamore tree" (CP, 461). But the second stanza snaps back abruptly from past to present, and the shift in mood is accompanied by a shift In imagery: 81

But storms have raged Those walls about, And the head has aged That once looked out; And zest is suaged And trust grows doubt, And slow effacement Is rife throughout, While fiercely girds the wind at the long-limbed sycamore ti'eel (CP, 461)

Everything in the scene has changed, from the weathered walls of the

house, to the aging head at the window, to the faith that once bound

them. The "slow effacement” is, as always in Hardy, a result of time’s

erosion which struck the poet with the fierceness of the wind against

the sycamore tree.

Over and over again, Hardy’s attention was caught by some link

between past and present which provided him with an apparently endless

indictment of time. The third stanza of "During Wind and Rain" can

serve as an index to a great many typical Hardy poems:

They are blithely breakfasting all-- Men and maidens--yea, liider the summer tree, With a glimpse of the bay, While pet fowl come to the knee. ... . Ah, no; the years 01 And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.

That plaintive, agonized refrain, "Ah, no; the years 01," is the is' dominant chord heard throughout Collected Poems.

"Looking Across" weaves together memories of a happy past with realizations of the dreary present and the inevitableness of death:

I

It is dark in the sky, And silence is where Our laughs rang high; And recall do I That One is out there. 82

II

The dawn is not nigh, And the trees are bare, And the waterways sigh That a year has drawn by, And Two are out there.

Ill

The wind drops to die Like the phantom of Care Too frail for a cry, And heart brings to eye That Three are out there.

IV

This Life runs dry That once ran rare And rosy in dye, And fleet the days fly, And Four are out there.

V

Tired, tired am I Of this earthly air And my wraith asks: Why, Since these calm lie Are not Five out there? (CP, 469)

In every stanza, the speaker’s growing awareness of the approach of death is reinforced by the natural setting: the sky is "dark" and silent; the "trees are bare"; the wind is hushed. Stanza four shifts the focus to the persona himself, whose "Life runs dry" where it once ran rich with promise. His realization that "fleet the days fly" is by now a familiar one that rounds the pattern out, and prepares the reader for the final statement, "tired am i/Of this earthly air," and makes inevitable and rhetorical the final question: "Why,/Since these

\ 83 calm lie,/Are not Five out there?" No answer is needed; soon enough the fifth grave will be dug, the reader realizes.

/

STATE »'EOT LBBABf 2M

CHAPTER II

REPRIEVES

Up to this point, this study has been primarily concerned with the involvement of time in the innumerable misfortunes that beset the human figures in Thomas Hardy’s poetry. Time, as the evidence sub­ mitted in the preceding chapter suggests, may be viewed as the instru­ mental or proximate cause of man’s distress. But the issue of final causality cannot be ducked altogether, because Hardy produced a num­ ber of poems whose main characters are personified abstractions. These shadowy, furtive beings Invite through their words and activities specu­ lation about the role of preternatural forces in man’s predicament.

This chapter will begin with an examination of soma of these pieces, and then proceed to another group of poems that shows Hardy’s singular response to the drabness of human life.

. In several poems, Hardy’s personified abstractions suggest strongly the existence of a communications gap between man and the powers- that-be. "The Lacjci ng Sensed (CP, 106-107), for example, a dialogue be­ tween two such powers--one is identified as "Time"; the other is "Ancient

Mind"--centers upon the fact that "the Mother," presumably Nature, is unaware of man’s suffering. "Time" is asked to explain the "Mother’s"

"crimes upon her creatures." The answer is an important one, since it clears the "Mother" of blame: she is blind, "sightless," and therefore unaware of "those fearful unfulfillments, that red ravage through her 85

zones/Whereat all creation groans." That she "sets wounds on what

she loves" is done "unwittingly." In view of this ignorance, the

poem suggests, "’Deal, then, her groping skill no scorn, no note of

malediction.’" That men suffer is not to be denied, but the point of

the poem is that such suffering Is not designed deliberately by some

force higher than man. Pain is simply a natural part of human exis­

tence, and not the business of a cosmic creature to impose.

"Doom and She" (CP, 108-109) fills out in more detail Hardy’s

heavenly pantheon: "The Mother of all things made" is again present

and again blind, but here a companion is with her, identified only as

"lord." Paralleling her lack of sight Is his lack of "feeling," which

makes it impossible for him to discriminate among various human emo­

tions. When she inquires about "’The fate of those I bear,’" from

whom she occasionally hears "a groan,/Or multitudinous moan,/As though

1 had schemed a world of strife,’" his answer Is that such "’questionings are vain’":

"World-weaver! what is Grief? . And what are Right, and Wrong, „ And Feeling, that belong To creatures all who owe thee fief? Why Is Weak worse than Strong?". . . (CP, 109)

Again, the effect of the poem is to absolve these forces from blame, since the one cannot see man’s plight and the other cannot feel it.

As Joseph Warren Beach correctly observes, in Hardy "the ruling power is neither omniscient nor benevolent. It is blind and indifferent."^

1Beach, The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, p. 520. 86

Glicksberg, too, has caught this point. Nature, he suggests, "is su­ perbly indifferent to moral values, concerned only with the perpetuation of the race.’^ Grierson and Smith point out that if "Mother Nature* . . 3 wounds the things she loves, the reason is that she is blind."

In light of these findings, it is quite clear that Hardy’s world view is not the traditional view of Western Christianity, with a loving and just Supreme Being presiding over a race of creatures who share in His divinity and who, as dozens of religious thinkers have said, grow in perfection the more God-like they become. For them, the world is a rational place, and some measure of contentment is derived from knowing, in Rabbi Ben Ezra’s words, "the whole design." Hardy, though, did not share Browning’s buoyant belief in the intelliglble- ness and reasonableness of the plan of the universe. In fact, man’s reasoning ability itself is often seen as a scourge by Hardy, because with the emergence of consciousness came also the emergence of frustra­ tion, and the ability to brood over pain and disappointment. The very power that separates man from lower forms of life, and which enables him to reach God and happiness, according to the traditional view, be­ comes in many Hardy poems, not a sign of nobility, but a sign of misery,

"Before Life and After" offers a good summation of this attitude:

/^Charles I. Glicksberg, "Hardy’s Scientific Pessimism," Western Humanities Review, VI (1952), 283.

'^Herbert J. C. Grierson and J. C. Smith, A Critical History of English Poetry (New York, 1946), p. 508. 87

A time there was--as one may guess And as, indeed, earth’s testimonies tell- Before the birth of consciousness, When all went well.

None suffered sickness, love, or loss, None knew regret, starved hope, or heart-burnings; None cared whatever crash or cross Brought wack to things.

If something ceased, no tongue bewailed, If something winced and waned, no heart was wrung; If brightness dimmed, and dark prevailed, No sense was stung.

But the disease of feeling germed, And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong; Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed How long, how long? (CP, 260)

This poem provides an interesting parallel to the pattern dis­ cussed earlier in this essay: a present state of unhappiness con­ trasted with an earlier state of joy. Before consciousness grew in man, he knew no pain simply because he did not possess the ability to know anything: "None suffered sickness, love, or loss,/None knew re­ gret, starved hope, or heart-burnings." And by comparison with his present condition, where "the disease of feeling" compels him to wince at every disappointment, the early state of ignorance seems bliss in­ deed.

In "’Freed the Fret of Thinking’" this point of view is seen again:

Freed the fret of thinking, Light of lot were we, Song with service linking Like to bird or bee: Chancing bale unblinking, Freed the fret of thinking On mortality J 88

Had not thought-endowment Beings ever known, What Life once or now meant None had wanted shown-- Measuring but the momenfc-- Had not thought-endowment Caught Creation’s groan!

Loosed from wrings of reason, We might blow like flowers, Sense of Time-wrought treason Would not then be ours In and out of season; Loosed from wrings of reason We should laud the Powers! (CP, 719-720)

As Mark Van Doren has remarked in connection with Hardy’s poetry,

"the qualities we think distinguish us are the qualities that make us miserable"; men are "skinless creatures, shivering in the winds of circumstances."^ These two poems, from among a much larger group that repeats this pattern, make quite clear an attitude toward man’s rational characteristics often voiced by Hardy: they intensify his misery. Ifrilike George Meredith who saw the power of thought man’s basis for hope, as Beach points out, Hardy often saw there only a * guarantee of more suffering.

In lines that recall Feuerbach’s thoughts on the same issue,

Hardy, in "A Plaint to Man," suggests that God’s existence can be ex­ plained by man’s psychological need for assurance. God is the narrator

Wherefore, 0 Man, did there come to you The unhappy need of creating me-- A form like your own--for praying to?

¿»Mark Van Doren, "The Poems of Thomas Hardy," in Four Poets on Poetry, ed. Don Cameron Allen (Baltimore, 196Q, pp. 89; 92.

^Beach, p. 518. 89

"Such a forced device," you may say, "is meet For easing a loaded heart at whiles: Man needs to conceive of a mercy-seat

Somewhere above the gloomy aisles Of this wailful world, or he could not bear The irk no local hope beguiles."

--But since I was framed in your first despair The doing without me has had no play In the minds of men when shadows scare;

And now that I dwindle day by day Beneath the deicide eyes of seers In a light that will not let me stay,

And to-morrow the whole of me disappears, The truth should be told, and the fact be faced That had best been faced in earlier years:

The fact of life with dependence placed On the human heart’s resource alone, In brotherhood bonded close and graced

With loving-kindness fully blown, And visioned help unsought, unknown. (CP, 306)

So, it is not only pain that man’s skill for understanding brings about, but self-deception. He is hoodwinked by his misery into

imagining that a cure for it exists in the form of a Supreme Being.

„ Another poem, "God’s Funeral," recounts the genealogy of man’s

God. The poem opens as the narrator overhears participants in a funeral talking about the bereaved:

"Framing him jealous, fierce, at first, We gave him justice as the ages rolled, Will to bless those by circumstance accurst, And longsuffering, and mercies manifold.

"And, tricked by our own early dream And need of solace, we grew self-deceived, Our making soon our maker did we deein, And what we had imagined we believed. 90

•’Till® in Time’s stayless stealthy swing, Uncompromising rude reality Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning, Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be. (CP, 308)

In other words, life has grown so dreary that belief in this "Monarch

of our fashioning" is no longer possible--the facts of life constantly

refute the myth. Again, Hardy’s characteristically wistful glance back

wards appears: "How sweet it was in years far hied/To start the wheels of day with trustful prayer,/To lie down liegely at the eventide/And

feel a blest assurance he was there!" The narrator is able to identify with the proceedings, as he realizes that "what was mourned for, I, too, long had prized."

A general pattern begins to emerge from the poems examined in this study. Man’s role in the Universe is not a happy one. Where once he lived out his life oblivious of the searching questions a rational being can ask, and untroubled by the anxiety a rational being must ac­ cept when he fails to find satisfactory answers to those questions, now he must twist and writhe in an environment unsuited to his powers of perception and his sensitivity. This is the over-arching context of Hardy’s unhappiness, the macrocosmic grounds of despondency: by definition, by an accident of evolution, men are sentenced to distress.

But within the lifetime of each person, a microcosmic evolution occurs.

A life filled at one time with hope and expectation, with love and friendship, with religious faith and fervor, is gradually changed to a lifetime of fretfulness and isolation. The memories of the former state that survive into the latter serve to intensify the suffering 91

that takes place. This polarity, between remembered days of joy and

actual days of woe, between a youthful past nostalgically recalled

by a man grown weary of unfulfilled desires, provides a fundamental tension in Thomas Hardy’s poetry.

Numerous scholars of Hardy have caught the presence of irony throughout Collected Poems. Richard Carpenter, for example, has written of the "sardonic irony" that characterizes the poems, particu­

larly those dealing with love and marriage."® Babette Deutsch com­ ments on Hardy’s "appreciation of opposite attitudes" that Is re­ sponsible for the ironic warp in his works."7* * 9The eternal clash be­ tween man’s aspirations and the actual facts of his existence, between the ideal and the real, is viewed by Ransom and Bowra’ as the basis for Hardy’s ironic vision. More recently, in an extensive and useful analysis of the poetry, Samuel Hynes has spoken lucidly of Hardy’s anti- nomial view of life "which recognizes that experience Is open to multiple

Interpretations, of which no one is simply right, and that the co­ existence of incongruities is a part of the structure of existence."^®

In Hynes* view, "the sense of contradictions which he could not resolve is at the core of everything he wrote.

®Carpenter, Thomas Hardy, p. 186.

7Deutsch, Poetry In Our Time, p. 10.

®John Crowe Ransom, ed„, Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy (Mew York, 1961), p. xx.

9Bowra, Inspiration and Poetry, p. 231.

l^Hynes, The Pattern of Hardy’s Poetry, pp. 41-42. 92

This analysis of Hardy’s treatment of time suggests, however,

that it is possible to define more clearly the reason for his "sense

of contradictions." It grows from his fretful awareness of the losing

struggle men engage in against the gradual but relentless erosion of

time. A fundamental incongruity in Hardy’s Collected Poems arises be­

cause the aspirations of men for serenity and joy are impossible to

fulfill in a world where "all things are subject to decay." Man’s

dreams are constantly contradicted by the facts of existence. Man

seeks the permanent attainment of his hopes, but his environment is

usually willing to grant him only a temporary realization of them.

In a universe of continual change, the most one can expect is fulfill­

ment followed painfully by the loss of what is dear. Love, hope, joy,

faith—all are possessed at one time by Hardy, but his hold is pried

loose by the superior strength of time. And as the distance in time

Is widened between the past stage of possession and the present stage

of dispossession, memories of the happier past return to sit side by

side In Hardy’s consciousness with his awareness of the empty present.

These remembrances of bygone bliss intensify his sense of loss, and ac­

count for the sense of sadness one encounters in reading the poetry.

From this context characterized by disappointment and frustra­

tion, it is only a short step to pessimism or to cynicism. 3ut despite

the temptations, Thomas Hardy stopped short of these extremes. / The term "pessimism" is subject to the same misleading latitude of interpretation pointed out in the term "Romanticism" by A. 0. Lovejoy.

To some it is simply a synonym for dejection or despondency, and surely 93

those qualities are found in abundance in Hardy’s poetry. But this

use of the term, as Arnold Whitridge has suggested, is misleading,

since pessimism is not merely the "denial of significance in the ordering of the universe, but the assertion of evil significance."* 2

The classic pessimist of the nineteenth century was, of course,

Schopenhauer, whose "great anthology of war" (to borrow a phrase from

Will Durant),*3 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, was first published in 1818. In a world bom in war and nurtured by a countless array of social disturbances, Schopenhauer’s gloomy philosophy found no dearth of sympathetic readers, although not at first. As R. H. Goodale has pointed out, "by 1879 every person alive to the developments of the day must have heard of him; by 1883 an educated man could not think of pessimism without thinking also of Schopenhauer."*^ Other works on pessimism abounded in the latter years of nineteenth century England: in 1882, J. W. Barlow’s The Ultimatum of Pessimism; the following year

T. B. Kilpatrick’s Pessimism and the Religious Conscience; in 1885 J.

R. Thomson’s Modem Pessimism.*3 Hardy was an avid reader, and one need not question his familiarity with the growing literature of pessi­ mism.

*2Arnold Whitridge, "Vigny and Housman: Study in Pessimism," American Scholar, X (1941), 156. l^Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (New York, 1953), p. 227.

*^R. H. Goodale, "Schopenhauer and Pessimism in the Nineteenth Century," PMLA, XLVII (1932), 242.

*3Webster, On A Darkling Plain, p. 138. 94

Routh finds Hardy "the most confirmed pessimist of his age";

gloomier than Carlyle, Arnold, Housman, George Moore or John Gals­

worthy.^ other critics, like G. Id. Young1* ? and Arnold Glicksberg1®

have used the term in describing Hardy, although without the energy

of Routh. David Daiches* remarks are representative of a widely held

attitude toward the poetry; "He gathered up all the data he could

find that encouraged his pessimism and threw them magnificently and IQ carelessly at the face of Heaven and his public."

But, as suggested above, one must distinguish Hardy’s point of view from that held by the legitimate philosophical pessimists.

To them, life is fundamentally evil, and this assumption precludes the viability of hope. Schopenhauer is worth quoting at length on this point:

With its deluded hopes and accidents bringing all calculations to nought, life bears so clearly the stamp of something which ought to disgust us, that it is difficult to conceive how any­ one could fail to recognize this, and be persuaded that life is here to be thankfully enjoyed, and that man exists in order to be happy. On the contrary, that continual deception and dis­ illusionment, as well as the general nature of life, present themselves as intended and calculated to awaken the conviction ' that nothing whatever is worth our exertions, our efforts, and our struggles, that all good things are empty and fleeting, that the world on all sides is bankrupt, and that life is a business that does not cover the costs.20

1^H. V. Routh, Towards the Twentieth Century: Essays in the Spiritual History of the Nineteenth (New York, 1937), p, 317. l^G., M. Young, ed., Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy (London, 1962), p. xix.

1^Glicksberg, p. 273,

^David Daiches, Poetry and The Modem World (Chicago, 1940), p. 19.

2®Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Representation, II, Trans. E. F. J. Payne (Indian Hills, Colorado, 1958), p. 574. 95

To Schopenhauer, relief from suffering is always temporary, and merely allows room in man for more discomfort:

Since everything is always imperfect and deceptive, everything agreeable is mixed with something disagreeable, every enjoyment is always only half an enjoyment, every gratification introduces its own disturbance, every relief new worries and troubles, every expedient for our daily and hourly needs leaves us in the lurch at every moment, and denies us its service.2^

To Schopenhauer, in the words of Durant, "life is evil because pain is its basic stimulus and reality, and pleasure is merely a negative cessation of pain."2* 2 To advocate optimism was, to Schopenhauer, entirely unwarranted by the painful facts of human existence. Hardy, as the following pages will show, produced a number of poems that must be called optimistic.

"Song Of Hope" is a typical example of Hardy’s occasional buoy­ ancy:

0 sweet To-morrow!-- After to-day There will away This sense of sorrow. Then let us borrow Hope, for a gleaming Soon will be streaming, Dimmed by no gray-- No gray I

While the winds wing us Sighs from The Gone, Nearer to dawn Minute-beats bring us; When there will sing us Larks, of a glory Waiting our story / Further anon— Anon!

2^Ibid., p. 577.

22Durant, p. 244. 96

Doff the black token, Don the red shoon, Right and retune Viol-strings broken: Null the words spoken In speeches of rueing, The night cloud is hueing, To-morrow shines soon-- Shines soon! (CP, 120-121)

Uhlike gloomy poems about the future studied in the preceding

chapter, ’’Song Of Hope" is a clear expression of Hardy’s ability to

see the future as an anodyne to the pains of the present. This poem

conveys as much awareness of present unhappiness as the others: "This

sense of sorrow" is felt at the moment; "Viol-strings" are broken;

thoughtless "speeches" have been made. But the poem does not end with

the focus on the present. The future figures more prominently in the

speaker’s mind, and the final lines contain the hopeful suggestion that "To-morrow" will bring improvement to his condition.

As pointed out earlier in this study, Hardy was not a philoso­ pher, and no systematic philosophy operates in his poetry. It can be safely said, though, that hope came naturally to him, although faith did not. "To Life" is a good example of the tenacity with which he held to hope:

0 Life with the sad seared face, I weary of seeing thee, And thy draggled cloak, and thy hobblipgpace, And thy too-forced pleasantry!

I know what thou would’st tell Of Death, Time, Destiny-- I have known it long, and know, too, well What it all means for me. 97

But canst thou not array Thyself in rare disguise, And feign like truth, for one mad day, That Earth is Paradise?

I’ll tune me to the mood, And mumm with thee till eve; And maybe what as interlude I feign, I shall believe! (CP, 107-108)

The poem expresses fully Hardy’s recognition of life’s woes, its

"sad seared face," and its "hobbling pace." But it also reveals what

Is an important ingredient in his response to all this--his desire to

lean on something solid, his desire to see life as meaningful and good,

even if this requires deluding himself. For, as this poem suggests, he may be able to move from pretense to belief. Not many poems are

as frank as this one in admitting the hypocrisy of this procedure,

but this poem is one of the best illustrations of Hardy’s energetic quest to find meaning and goodness in the human cycle.

"To An Lhbom Pauper Child" is a tender expression of Hardy’s desire to find rays amid the gloom (CP, 116-117). Here he addresses a child whoseLbirthtime is imminent, and tries to warn it of the dangers of life where "Time-wraiths turn our songsingings to fear." The second stanza summarizes well Hardy’s indictment of life:

Hark, how the peoples surge and sigh, And laughters fail, and greetings die: Hopes dwindle; yea, Faiths waste away, Affections and enthusiasms numb; Thou canst not mend these things if thou dost come. (CP, 116)

But in stanza four he dismisses as futile his desire to warn the child of what life holds in store: "Vain vow! No hint of mine may hence/ 98

To theeward fly: to thy locked sense/Explain none can/Life’s pending plan." The poem concludes with the speaker revealing clearly his hope that the pauper child will fare better than he: "such are we--/

Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary--/That I can hope/Health, love, friends, II scope/ln full for thee; can dream thou wilt find/Joys seldom yet attained by humankindl" Again, the presence of hope contests with the dreary facts of life for a hearing, and makes us doubt with the speaker the effectiveness of it, but it is hope nonetheless, and its presence is incompatible with pessimism. Time, which has brought such disappoint­ ment and discomfort to the speaker, may, he hopes, bring better things to this child. It is significant that the poem does not say joys have never been "attained by humankindl" It says they have "seldom" been attained, which means there is some precedent for happiness.

"On a Fine Morning" is another hopeful poem which underscores

Hardy’s desire to believe in the future:

Whence comes Solace?—Not from seeing What is doing, suffering, being, Not from heeding Time’s monitions; But in cleaving to the Dream, And in gazing at the gleam Whereby gray things golden seem.

Thus do I this heyday, holding Shadows but as lights unfolding, As no specious show this moment With its iris-hued erabowment; But as nothing other than Part of a benignant plan; Proof that earth was made for man. (CP, 118)

Again, the poem makes no attempt to gloss over the discomfort of the present. It is quite plain that "Life’s conditions" are sorrowful, 99

that "Time’s monitions" are not joyful. It is equally clear that the

light he sees is more projected than actually seen, more willed than de­

duced. But the point of the poem is that there exists the means of finding

"Solace" even within the depressing, "suffering" present. The solution

lies in "cleaving to the Dream,/And in gazing at the gleam," In other

words, the future holds the anodyne to the pain of the moment. Its light

penetrates the speaker’s gloom and makes "golden" the "gray things" that

trouble him. This light imagery continues into the second stanza, and ex­

presses effectively the optimistic bent of the poem. With his eyes lifted

to the future and Its "Dream," the speaker is able to view the "Shadows"

of the present, not as signs of a lifetime of woe, but as "lights un­

folding." Obviously, this illumination is considerably lower voltage

than the brilliance of Dante’s beatific vision, or the Intensity of

Crashaw’s spiritual enlightenment. But it seems equally clear that

Hardy’s vision of light assumes almost epiphanel proportions when con­

trasted with the impenetrable smog of James Thomson, or the cynical

pessimism of A. E. Housman. One might pick and choose from among the

thousand selections in Hardy’s poetic works a number of pieces which re­

call Thomson’s "City of Dreadful Night." But a representative selec­

tion must include poems like "On A Find Morning"; and these compositions render invalid the generalization "pessimistic" when applied to all of

Hardy’s work.

The polarity found earlier between past expectations and present disillusionment is not the only tension, then, in the poetry. Another tension exists in Hardy between the facts of the present and his specu­ lations about the future. Time is still the key factor, and its ex­ tension into the future rescues the poet from the excesses of 100 philosophical pessimism. His "meliorism" guards him from the absolute depression of real pessimism, while allowing him at the same time to 23 recognize the myriad setbacks one encounters in a normal lifetime.

Hardy’s gleam of hope is not enough to make him a visionary; its light is both low and flickering. But its presence in his Collected Poems cannot be denied, and any generalizations about these works must take ! this into consideration.

Typical also of Hardy’s poems about the future is an approach to death as an escape from the frustrations of life. "Why Do I?" is repre­ sentative:

Why do I go on doing these things? Why not cease? Is it that you are yet in this world of welterings And unease. And that, while so, mechanic repetitions please?

When shall I leave off doing these things?— When I hear You have dropped your dusty cloak and taken you wondrous wings To another sphere, Where no pain is: Then shall I hush this dinning gear. (CP, 799-800)

2^In his "Apology" to Late Lyrics and Earlier, Hardy rejected the pessimistic label critics had attached to his poetry. He preferred instead his own concept of "evolutionary meliorism": "the exploration of reality, and its frank recognition stage by stage along the survey, with an eye to the best consummation possible" (CP, 526-27). The best study of this theory is an article by J. 0. Bailey, "Evo­ lutionary Meliorism in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy," SP, LX (July, 1963), 569-87. For present purposes, it is sufficient to realize that Hardy himself held out the possibility of improvement in the human condition, but he insisted that the transformation would occur very slowly. 101

the poem grants full recognition to the present, "this world of

welterings/And unease," but lifts the focus from the present to

the future. Time which keeps man prisoner in life, will become finally

his means of release in the guise of death. Time is not explicitly

named in this poem, but its involvement In the cycle is evident through­

out .

Time is explicitly named In "After the Last Breath" (CP, 253-4),

another piece in the same manner. The opening stanzas reflect the

finality of death, as the speaker realizes that it is no longer neces­

sary to sit at the sickbed and speak in hushed tones. Those who are

present, "blankly ... gaze," and realize that "whether we leave to­

night or wait till day/Counts as the same" to the woman now dead. Stanza

three heightens the feelings of frustration and helplessness, as the

speaker notes "the lettered vessels of mendicaments," each presenting

Its "silly face" as "useless gear." The final two stanzas represent a marked shift in mood:

And yet we feel that something savours well; We note a numb relief withheld before; Our well-beloved is prisoner in the cell Of Time no more.

We see by littles now the deft achievement Whereby she has escaped the Wrongers all, In view of which our momentary bereavement Outshapes but small. (CP, 254)

The "relief" they feel is plainly marked "numb," not to be confused with the apocalyptic fervor of religious poetry. Simply put, the dead woman has achieved victory; she has escaped through death-the ravages of time. And the speaker is consoled by his awareness of this. In a 102

life characterized by pain and disappointment, death cannot be viewed

as merely a sad event. It is at least a negative consolation.

Another type of consolation poem characteristic of Hardy occurs

where he sees survival after death evidenced in nature. "Transforma­

tions" is typical:

Portion of this yew Is a man my grandsire knew, Bosomed here at its foot; This branch may be his wife, A ruddy human life Now turned to a green shoot.

These grasses must be made Of her who often prayed, Last century, for repose; And the fair girl long ago Whom I often tried to know May be entering this rose.

So, they are not underground, But as nerves and veins abound In the growths of upper air, And they feel the sun and rain, And the energy again That made them what they were! (CP, 443)

Here the act of death is not emphasized at all. What concerns the speajker is the consolation he derives by dwelling on the possibility that the beauty he sees in the yew tree, the grass, and the rose is partially accountable for by the nourishment these things knew, "his wife" and "the fair girl ... I often tried to know," These natural objects, then, serve as a bridge joining the speaker with the dead.

In the case of the "fair girl," he does not have to rely on memory alone to join her: the rose is a physical link with her. For a mo­ ment, past and present are one, and time’s villainy is transcended. 103

At other times, the dead person ’’survives*' in a less explicit and visible way. In "The Figure in the Scene," the speaker revisits the location where he once sketched his beloved "seated amid the gauze/

Of moisture, hooded . . ./With rainfall marked across" (CP, 447).

Here the place itself is the bridge with the past: "her rainy form is the Genius still of the spot,/immutable ..."

In several poems, Hardy writes about the possibility of com­ munion with his dead lover. "Old Excursions" is representative:

"What’s the good of going to Ridgeway, Ceme, or Sydling Mill, Or to Yell’ham Hill, Blithely bearing Casterbridge-way As we used to do? She will no more climb up there, Or be visible anywhere In those haunts we knew."

But to-night, while walking weary, Near me seemed her shade, Come as ’twere to upbraid This my mood in deeming dreary Scenes that used to please; And, if she did come to me, Still solicitous, there may be Good in going to these.

So, I’ll care to roam to Ridgeway, Cerne, or Sydling Mill, Or to Yell’ham Hill, Blithely bearing Casterbridge-way As we used to do. Since her phasm may flit out there, And may greet me anywhere In those haunts we knew. (CP, 489-90)

Stanza one deals with the finality of death, expressing the conventionally gloomy assumption that death means the Irrevocable end to the love rela­ tionship. This mood shifts in the second stanza though, as "her shade" 104

chastises the speaker for "deeming dreary" the scenes they visited

together when she was alive. This visitation exists only in his mind--

more psychological than literal or religious--but it does console him.

The final stanza is exactly opposite in mood to the first. Now, instead

of rejecting as useless his visits to "Ridgeway," "Ceme," "Sydllng Mill"

and "Yell’ham Hill," he affirms their value since she may again visit

him there. The pattern discovered earlier in this study In which the

speaker’s despondency is intensified by recalling the past is broken here

His spirits are, in fact, revived by the past, since the "shade" of his

beloved is able to transcend time and space to visit him.

"A Night in November" repeats this pattern:

I marked when the weather changed And the panes began to quake, And the winds rose up and ranged, That night, lying half-awake.

Dead leaves blew into my room, And alighted upon my bed, And a tree declared to the gloom Its sorrow that they were shed.

One leaf of them touched my hand, And I thought that it was you There stood as you used to stand, And saying at last you knew! (CP, 555)

Again, the opening stanza established a conventionally dreary setting.

The quaking windows and wild winds create a surrealistic context, exactly right for "lying half-awake" as he does. This mood is intensified in the middle stanza as "Dead leaves" reflect the speaker’s own barrenness, and the tree his isolation. But the final stanza again shows the bound­ aries of time being overcome, this time by a single leaf that touches the speaker’s hand, and which for a moment reminds him of her touch.

For a fleeting Instant, past blurs with present, and the lovers are re­ united, at least imaginatively. 105

"When Dead" raises the possibility of a continued existence after

death, but Hardy gives this poem a different twist. Normally, the

speaker is preceded in death by his beloved. Here, however, it is the

speaker’s own death that will occur first.

It will be much better when I am under the bough; I.shall be more myself, Dear, then, Than I am now.

No sign of querulousness To wear you out Shall I show there: strivings and stress Be quite without.

This fleeting life-brief blight Will have gone past When I resume my old and right Place in the Vast.

And when you come to me To show you true, Doubt not I shall infallibly Be waiting you. (CP, 685)

By now the pattern is familiar: from the anxious and uneasy present

to a vision of serenity and reunion in the future. Hardy is emphatic

In his recognition of life’s troubles: the speaker’s "querulousness"

has been wearing on his partner; their relationship has been marked by

"strivings and stress"; life is described as a "blight." But the

reader senses that these afflictions will cease when the speaker takes

his "old and right/Place in the Vast." The final stanza confirms this:

when she too has gained her release from life, he will be waiting faith­

fully "in the Vast." In fact, the certainty with which this promise is

made-»"Doubt not I shall infallibly/Be waiting you"--makes the poem more an expression of faith than the more typical gasp of hope encoun­

tered in other poems. 106

In numerous other poems, Hardy raises the possibility of life after death, and is consoled by this thought. In ’’The Marble Tablet"

(1916), a man stands staring at his dead lover’s cemetery marker.

The poem’s conclusion hints at hope: "That one has at length found the haven/Which every one other will find;/With silence on what shone behind" (CP, 620). "The Sea Fight," written in 1916 to commemorate

Captain Prowse who perished with the "Queen Mary," closes with the pos sibility of a future life after death: "Maybe amid the changes/Of ocean’s cavemed dim profound,/Gaily his spirit ranges/With his com­ rades, /With his comrades all around" (CP, 772). In "I Found Her Out

There" the theme returns to lovers separated by death. The speaker concludes: "Yet her shade, maybe,/Will creep underground/Ti11 it catch the sound/of that western sea/As it swells and sobs/Where she once domiciled,/And joy in its throbs/With the heart of a child" (CP,

322-323).

Hardy, then, was neither consistently gloomy nor consistently hopeful in his reaction to time’s progression. Generally speaking, in those poems whose focus is either the past or the present, the dom­ inant color is gray, streaked, occasionally with black. When his atten­ tion is directed to the future, the canvas is still gray--the present is bleak, whether he looks ahead or behind--but here and there one is struck by a dab of whiteness, a hope that things will get better.

These brighter brush strokes are important because they compel a distinction to be drawn between Hardy’s work and the work of poets who may resemble him in their points of view about the past and the present, but who interpret the future in a fundamentally different way. 107

In the following epilogue, A. E. Housman’s response to the cycle of time will be explored because it provides a fruitful contrast with

Hardy’s position. Both poets have often been swept together under the rug of pessimism, but, as the evidence submitted in the epilogue will attest, the Shropshire poet is the more deserving of this desig­ nation.

/ I OÍ

EPILOGUE

A CONTRAST WITH HOUSMAN

Apart from their mutual preoccupation with time, Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman invite comparison for several reasons. Their poetic careers began during the Victorian decline and continued well into the

Twentieth Century. Their lives were roughly contemporary: Hardy’s dates are 1840-1928, while Housman’s are 1859-1936. (Housman, it is interesting to note, was one of the pallbearers at Hardy’s funeral.)

Each published his first collection of poetry during the 1890*s. Be­ sides these accidental coincidences, both poets normally cast their poems in rural settings: Hardy’s Wessex and Housman’s Shropshire are pastoral in topography and inhabited by people who are uncomplicated.

These idyllic characteristics make bitingly ironic the dreary lives often led by these figures.

Both poets enjoyed success in non-poetic fields. Hardy’s fame as a novelist flourished in his own time, and might have encouraged him to go on with his novels if the critics had not tom apart his last two books, Life’s Little Ironies and Jude the Obscure, thus driving him back to poetry, his first love. Housman’s fame as a classics scholar, though less public than a novelist’s, was widely acknowledged by his professional colleagues. Known chiefly for his editions of three Latin poets, Juvenal, Lucan, and Manilius (this last his main undertaking),

Housman was considered the finest Latinist in England, and one of the 109

finest in the world, according to Gilbert Highet, himself a distinguished

Latinist.^ Garrod was not hesitant in judging Housman the best scholar

in Europe in his day.

Like many other late Victorian and early modem poets, Hardy

and Housman often turned their attentions to the dark and gloomy aspects

of life, a fact which has been emphasized by critics for half a century.

In their Critical History of English Poetry, for example, Grierson and

Smith have found them alike by virtue of their "arraignment of a world

in which the dice seem to be so heavily weighted against poor human- 3 ity." Their "unappeasable personal dadness" has been offered by James

Reeves^ to explain their depressing impact on readers, while Joseph

Warren Beach has written of the "peculiarly stony pessimism" which they

don to protect themselves in "an unfriendly world."3 John Livingston

Lowes finds Hardy’s verse "pervaded . . . with a sense of the continued presence of the dead,"3 a judgment made about Housman’s Shropshire by

John peale Bishop: "it is a country that belongs to the dead."7 H. J.

^.Gilbert Highet, A Clerk of Oxenford: Essays on Literature and Life (New York, 1954), p„ 174.

2H. W. Garrod, The Profession of Poetry (Oxford, 1929), p. 212.

^Herbert J. C. Grierson and J. C. Smith, A Critical History of English Poetry (New York, 1946), p. 529.

James Reeves, A Short Hi story of Eng1ish Poetry (New York, 1962), p. 212.

5Joseph Warren Beach, English Literature of the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Centuries, 1798 to the First World War (New York, 1962), pp. 203-204.

3 John Livingston Lowes, Essays in Appreciation (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), p. 133.

2 John Peale Bishop, "The Poetry of A. E. Housman," Poetry, LVI (June, 1940), 151. 110

C. Grierson sees them as "the two poets who sang the swan-song of the 8 century, its faiths and hopes and dreams." The incisive remarks of

Max Beerbohm summarize the opinions of most observers:

How compare either of these grim two? Each has an equal knack. Hardy supplies the pill that’s blue, Housman the draught that’s black.9

But beyond the level of generalization, the jury is hung.

F. L. Lucas finds Hardy’s despondency "softened by compassion" a virtue he does not see in Housman.Samuel Hynes calls them both pessimists, but suggests that Housman’s is of a more "sentimental" variety.11 Pessimism is rejected by Hobart Edgren as a meaningful de­ scription of their outlooks; he prefers to emphasize Hardy’s meliorism, 12 and Housman’s respect for "the nobility of man." Roy Morrell sees 13 "resilience" in Hardy but not in Housman. Agnosticism is a common bond between them, according to Hugh Molscri, but he distinguishes the 14 pair finding in Hardy a longing "for the solace of religion." To cite only one more, Hardy’s alleged "metaphysic" gives hinra philosophical * 11

®H. J. C. Grierson, Lyrical Poetry of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1929), p. 153.

9Quoted in F. L. Lucas, The Greatest Problem, and Other Essays (New York, 1961), p. 212.

1QIbid., p. 218.

11Hynes, The Pattern of Hardy’s Poetry, p. 179.

^Hobart C. Edgren, "A Hardy-Housman Parallel," Notes and Queries, New Series, I (1954), 126.

13rov Morrell, Thomas Hardy: The Will and The Way (Kuala Lumpur, 1965), p. 125.

1^Hugh Molson, "The Philosophy of Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman," Quarterly Review, CCLXVIII (1937), 211. Ill bent, in Charles Williams’ estimation, which distinguishes him from Housman.

As the following pages will reveal, an examination of their respective attitudes toward time crystallizes not only the areas of agreement between Hardy and Housman, but a fundamental difference as well. Both poets write within a context distinguished by its candid recognition of isolation and suffering as key ingredients of the human situation. Hardy’s Collected Poems contain numerous expressions of the desperate campaign men must wage against the ordinary vicissitudes of life. Men are tiny specks in a vast and impersonal universe, Hardy admits frequently, and this disproportionate equation is a continuing source of anxiety. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad XIV is a typical example of that poet’s similarly dim view: There pass the careless people That call their souls their own: Here by the road I loiter, How idle and alone.

Ah, past the plunge of plummet, In seas I cannot sound, My heart and soul and senses, World without end, are drowned.

His folly has not fellow Beneath the blue of day That gives to man or woman His heart and soul away.

^Charles Williams, Poetry At Present (Oxford, 1930), p. 32. 112

There flowers no balm to sain him From east of earth to west That’s lost for everlasting The heart out of his breast.

Here by the labouring highway -With empty hands I stroll: Sea-deep, till doomsday morning. Lie lost my heart and soul.*°

With its regular iambic pattern, its end rhyme, and its ballad

stanza, this poem is exactly like the vast majority of pieces in Hous­

man’s Collected Poems: short, carefully chiseled, and consistent in

form. Typical too is the poem’s persona who confesses his abysmal

world-weariness like some extraordinarily pithy Byronic hero. The

persona’s admission of his inability to "sound" the "seas" of life,

his total ("heart and soul senses") and enduring ("World without end")

immersion in this sea of frustration, his grim rejection of the idea

that other people can somehow lighten the load men must bear, and his

despairing emphasis on his own emptiness and isolation—all of these

attitudes are repeated with depressing consistency throughout Housman’s

poetic works. A couplet in More Poems XIX might stand as a summary of

Housman’s gloomy view: "Who made the world I cannot tell;/’Tis made,

and here am I in hell." r

Housman, like Hardy, sees man’s rational faculties as instumen r

of discomfort, and not as signs of nobility. In "The Immortal Part,"

16A. E. Housman, The Collected Poems of A. E. Hpusman (New York, 1965), p. 27. Hereafter, references to Housman’s poems will appear in the text according to the group of poems to which they belong, and the number assigned to them in this edition. These standard ab­ breviations will be used: A Shropshire Lad, ASL; Last Poems, LP; More Poems, MP; Additional Poems, AP. 113

(ASL XLI1I), Housman refers to "the dust of thoughts," and to "this brain that fills the skull with schemes,/And Its humming hive of dreams. ft

In A Shropshire Lad XLIX, he rejects thinking altogether, insisting that

’”tls only thinklng/Lays lads underground." Last Poems X is a clear and biting expression of his distrust of thought:

Could man be drunk for ever With liquor, love, or fights, Lief should I rouse at morning And lief lie down of nights.

But men at whiles are sober And think by fits and starts, And if they think, they fasten Their hands upon their hearts.

Although Housman’s oft-voiced preference for "liquor, love, or fights" has no consistent parallel in Hardy’s work, both poets agree that in­ tellectual activity is more apt to worsen man’s predicament than amelio­ rate It.

A Shropshire Lad XLVIIX is interesting to look at, because it recalls poems where Hardy looks covetously back to an age when men had not yet developed their powers of intellection. Housman’s poem is not concerned with the distant, evolutionary past of all mankind, but with the period of time before he was bom; how long before Is irrelevant.

"Men loved unkindness then," but "I slept and saw not; tears fell down,

I did not mourn;/Sweat ran and blood sprang out and 1 was never sorry."

The point of the poem is not that men were better or life was easier before his birth, but that non-existence is better than existence— if one does not exist, he cannot suffer. With birth and maturity comes consciousness and unrest: "Now, and I muse for why and never find the 114 reason.” The final stanza conveys the depths of Housman’s depression, and the role of thought in it:

Ay, look: high heaven and earth ail from the prime foundation; All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain: Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation-- (»1 why did I awake? When shall I sleep again? (ASL XLVIII)

Within the intellectual Wasteland through which Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman pass, there are three landmarks: the past, the pre­ sent, and the future. It is quite clear that Hardy’s present is more chaotic than his past, as the preceding chapters suggested, and this same unhappy transition can be observed in Housman’s work. In its most characteristic form, a fragment frcma happy past is recalled by the speaker, and is bonded into an ironic amalgam with actual experiences of the way life has become. A Shropshire Lad XXXVIII is representative:

The winds out of the west land blow, My friends have breathed them there; Warm with the blood of lads I know Comes east the sighing air.

It fanned their temples, filled their lungs, Scattered their forelocks free; My friends made words of it with tongues That talk no more to me.

Their voices, dying as they fly, Loose on the wind are sown; The names of men blow soundless by, My fellows’ and my own.

Oh lads, at home I heard you plain, But here your speech is still, And down the sighing wind in vain You hollo from the hill. / The wind and I, we both were there, But neither long abode; Now through the friendless world we fare And sigh upon the road. 115

Here past and present are linked imaginatively by the wind.

This time-union is paralleled topographically as well: the "west

land," associated with the world of companionship, is part of his

past, while the east land, connected with isolation and hostility, is

the world of the present. Like certain geographical markers in Hardy’s

poetry, the wind is the intermediary between then and now, between

there and here, and is a painful reminder to the speaker of the changes

that have occured in his life. In the end, the wind is incapable of

actually carrying the voices from the west land, just as the speaker

is unable to relive the existence he knew there in the past. Both the wind and he now "sigh upon the road." The past can be recalled, but not recreated.

This pattern is repeated in A Shropshire Lad XL:

Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went j And cannot come again.

Once again, nostalgia is mixed with current weariness, and the end pro­ duct is a sense of loss. The lightly drawn images--"those blue remembered hills," with their "spires" and "farms’’--underscore deftly the attractiveness of the past, and make readily acceptable the implied heartbreak of the parting lines: the speaker can never go back to "the land of lost content." His life has moved beyond that point, and re­ membrances of it, coupled with the knowledge that It cannot be recovered, grieve him. 116

The gravest loss that occurs as the Shropshire lad abandons his

leisurely rural environment for the urban frenzy of London (that city

Is occasionally identified in the poems), is the loss of real human companionship. But In a few instances, Housman laments as well the

loss of natural companionship, as in A Shropshire Lad XLI:

In my own shire, if I was sad, Homely comforters I had: The earth, because my heart was sore, Sorrowed for the son she bore; And the standing hills, long to remain, Shared their short-lived comrade’s pain And bound for the same bourn as I, On every road I wandered by, Trod beside me, close and dear, The beautiful and death-struck year: Whether in the woodland brown I heard the beechnut rustle down, And saw the purple crocus pale Flower about the autumn dale; Or littering far the fields of May Lady-smocks a-bleaching lay, And like a skylit water stood The bluebells in the azured wood.

Two kinds of natural images dominate this part of the poem. The "earth*' and the "standing hills” are both permanent things, immune to time’s killing cycle. But the "beechnut," the "purple crocus," the "Lady- smocks," and the "bluebells" are impermanent fixtures, no less affected by "The beautiful and death-struck year" than the Shropshire lad him­ self. Together they formed a grlm-yet-beautiful witness to the inevita­ bility of decay and death, and mirrored effectively the speaker’s own recognition of this fact. And this was consoling to him: "In my own shire, if I was sad,/Homely comforters I had."

But he is no longer in his "own shire." That belongs now to the past. He is in London, as the second part of the poem reveals, and 117

there he sees "No such helpmates, only men;/And these are not in

plight to bear,/If they would, another’s care." They are "Too unhap­

py to be kind" and "Undone with misery." Unlike the flowers, men can

brood, and "hate their fellow man." Where the speaker was once con­

soled in his suffering by the presence of nature, he Is now alone with

his grief. He has neither flowers nor fellowship to shore him up.

The consolations of the past do not survive into the present, and this

is equally true in Housman’s verse as it is in Hardy’s.

Although Hardy’s personified time has no real parallel in

Housman’s poetry, the involvement of time in Housman’s distress; is no

less apparent. His "Eight O’clock" (LP, XV) is a particularly good il­

lustration of this:

He stood, and heard the steeple Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town. One, two, three, four, to market-place and people It tossed them down.

Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour, He stood and counted them and cursed his luck; And then the clock collected in the tower Its strength, and struck.

By building definite pauses into the structure of this poem, Housman

conveys skillfully both the measured regularity of the steeple bell

tolling away the condemned man’s last minutes of life--"One, two, three,

four, to market-place and people/It tossed them down"--as well as the dramatic tension of the moment itself--"Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,/He stood and counted them and cursed his luck." The final state­ ment, with the verb placed carefully at the end captures with jarring abruptness the fatal intersection of the man and the moment. Within 118

the context of the poem, ’'struck" Is actually a pun. Idiomatically,

the verb completes the familiar phrase, "the clock struck"; that is,

It tolled the hour. But the reader can hardly miss another level of

meaning in It: the clock has been personified until it (or time itself) ! assumes the role of executioner. First it "collected ... Its strength',’’ and then it "¡struck" the deathblow. !

The differences between Hardy and Housman do not really emerge

until one looks to the Shropshire poet for some analogue to Hardy’s

occasional reliance on the future for relief from present anxiety.

But one seeks In vain among Housman’s poems for even an approximation

of the buoyancy found, for example, in Hardy’s "Song of Hope."

A passage from Housman’s well-known "’Terence, this Is stupid

stuff" (ASL, LXII) typifies his attitude toward the future:

Therefore, since the world has still Much good, but much less good than ill, And while the sun and moon endure Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure, I’d face it as a wise man would, And train for ill and not for.good.

Housman does not deny categorically the presence of "good’' in the world,

nor the possiblity of good luck; but it is highly significant that he

chooses to minimize their existence, and elects instead to emphasize

the indisputable fact of misfortune. Man’s experiences in the past and present make overwhelmingly apparent the presence of hardship and dis­ appointment, and this empirical evidence plays the dominant role in shaping Housman’s outlook. The psychological context from which he views the future is too battle-scarred, too time-tom, to permit him the luxury of hope and the consolation of faith. 119

Last Poems XXXV Is another good example:

When first my way to fair I took Few pence in purse had I, And long I used to stand and look At things I could not buy.

Now times are altered: if I care , To buy a thing, I can; The pence are here and here’s the fair, But where’s the lost young man?

—To think that two and two are four And neither five nor three The heart of man has long been sore And long *tis like to be.

Like Hardy, Housman uses the setting of the fair to show the polarity between illusion and reality. When he was young and poor, the assort­ ment of wares enticed him. Now, though, "times are altered": he has the money, but is older, and things no longer attract him. In the final two lines, he sums up what experience has taught him, and speculates about the future: "The heart of man has long been sore/And long *tis like to be." Again, Housman’s vision is unable to transcend the past— life has been disappointing and will continue to be that way.

Several poems open with a determined optimism only to close with its 'obliteration. More Poems XVI follows this pattern, and enriches It by a complementary chronological progression:

How clear, how lovely bright, How beautiful to sight Those beams of morning play; How heaven laughs out with glee Where, like a bird set free, Up from the easter sea > Soars the delightful day.

To-day I shall be strong, No more shall yeId to wrong, Shall squander life no more; 120

Days lost, I know not how, I shall retrieve them now; Now I shall keep the vow I never kept before.

Ensanguining the skies How heavily it dies Into the west away; Past touch and sight and sound, Not further to be found, How hopeless under ground Falls the remorseful day.

There is a pronounced contrast here between the lyrical day-break

imagery of the first two stanzas and the direful picture of night­

fall, that concludes the poem. The bright "beams of morning" and gleeful, laughing heaven, that mark the "delightful day" provide a

suitable setting for the speaker’s renewed promises to "be strong" and "squander life no more." But morning cannot last forever, and by evening his aspirations have been vanquished by reality. Daylight

"dies" in the west "Not further to be found" and Is interred "under ground" with the speaker’s ambitions. Because of its architectonic concern with the passing of time from dawn to dusk, and its parallel concern with the demise of resolution, this poem captures in miniature

Housman’s general tendency to portray the impermanence of human values in the face of time’s inexorability. This piece, like so many others

In Housman’s Collected Poems, takes a decidedly dim view of the future.

The closest Housman gets to consolation is to encourage seizure of the moment at hand and enjoyment of its pleasure, but this prescrip­ tion is usually connected with a frank recognition of the ephemerality of joy. More Poems XXII is representative: 121

Ho, everyone that thirsteth And hath the price to give, Come to the stolen waters, Drink and your soulo shall live.

Come to the stolen waters, And leap the guarded pale, And pull the flower in season Before desire shall fail.

It shall not last for ever, Ko more than earth and skies; But he that drinks in season Shall live before he dies.

June suns, you cannot store them To warm the winter’s cold, The lad that hopes for heaven Shall fill his mouth with mould.

As usual, the sober reflections that are voiced are counterpoised by the poem’s ballad structure, and taken together, the matter and manner produce an anxious kind of solace, far removed from the hopefulness occasionally expressed by Hardy. Carpe diem is an ancient poetic themesbut it is perfectly suited to Housman’s pejorative tendencies.

The most life is willing to grant man is temporary fulfillment of his desires; flowers, as the poem acknowledges, must be plucked ”in season."

To "live" is to enjoy the present moment, like the tentmaker of The

Rubaiyat. To ask for more is folly: "The lad that hopes for heaven/

Shall fill his mouth with mould."

If flowers fade and desire fails as time continues, then there is not much point in living long enough to witness these alterations.

The time to die is at the peak of pleasure, the pinnacle of victory.

"To An Athlete Dying Young" (ASL, XIX) is Housman’s best-known expres­ sion of this idea. Because he died before his accomplishments were sur­ passed by others, the athlete has achieved a real victory, and is buried 122 a hero. Prowess and fame, like love and contentment, are short­ lived. They contain within themselves a fatal susceptibility to the disease that ravages all human values--time:

Smart lad, to slip betimes away From fields where glory does not stay And early though the laurel grows It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut Cannot see the record cut, And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears.

The pinch of time is evident, then, in the poetry of Hardy and

Housman. As a man grows older, his aspirations are modified by his experiences; his earlier enthusiasms are squelched by a host of disap­ pointments. He passes from joy to jaundice, from certainty to skepti­ cism, from hope to gloom. And as he marches further from felicity he frequently looks back to the lost Eden of his past. Memories of bliss deepen his suffering--the painfulness of life is in itself a burden, but linked with the memory of a happy past, the burden is unbearably heavy. For Housman, brief respite is gained by draining the momentary pleasure life offers. But beyond that, the future promises more woe than weal. Housman’s myopia precludes visions. Like a prudent gambler, he weighs the odds, and then bets on the probability of future disap­ pointments instead of the tenuous possibility of satisfaction.

But Hardy’s resemblance to Housman ends at that critical point where he raises his sights from the gray present to contemplate the future. Hardy sees blotches of light, not a steady radiance. He is no visionary either. But when his rays of brightness are looked at 123 through the steady smog of Housman, time--most often the instrument of Hardy’s undoing--is discovered to be also the means by which he is able to transcend the present and find comfort in the future. So it is that occasionally, unpredictably, time changes its role for Hardy

••Ah, no; the years 0!" becomes "Part of a benignant plan;/Proof that earth w’as made for man." BIBLIOGRAPHY 125

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Beach, Joseph Warren. The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry. New York, 1956.

______. English Literature of the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Centuries, 1798 to the First World War. New York, 1962.

Bowra, C. M. Inspiration and Poetry, 'tew York, 1964.

Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. The Triumph of Time. Cambridge, Mass., 1966.

______. The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture. Cambridge, Mass., 1951. Vintage Edition.

Bush, Douglas. English Poetry. 1952. Galaxy Edition, 1963.

______. Science and English Poetry. New York, 1950.

Cooke, John D. and Lionel Stevenson. Engli sh Literature of the Victorian Period. New York, 1949.

Daiches, David. Poetry and The Modem World. Chicago, 1940.

Deutsch, Babette. Poetry In Our Time. New York, 1956.

Durant, Will. The Story of Philosophy. New York, 1953.

Fairchild, Hoxie Neale. Religious Trends in English Poetry. Vol. V: Gods of a Changing Poetry. New York, 1962.

Garrod, H. W. The Profession of Poetry. Oxford, 1929.

Goodale, R. H. "Schopenhauer and Pessimism in the Nineteenth Century," PMLA, XLVII (1932), 242.

Grierson, H. J. C. Lyrical Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. New York, 1929.

______., J. C. Smith. A Critical History of English Poetry. New York, 1946. 126

Highet, Gilbert. A Clerk of Oxenford: Essays on Literature and Life. New York, 1954.

Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind: 1830-1870. New Haven, 1957.

Irvine, William. Apes, AngeIs, and Victorians. New York, 1955.

Levine, Richard A., ed. Backgrounds to Victorian Literature. San Francisco, 1967.

Lowes, John Livingston. Essays in Appreciation. Cambridge, Mass., 1936.

Lucas, F, L. The Greatest Problem, and Other Essays. New York, 1961.

.______. Ten Victorian Poets. Cambridge, 1940.

Pinto, Vivian De Sola. Crisis in English Poetry: 1880-1940. London, 1958.

'-'"Reeves, James. A Short History of English Poetry. New York, 1962.

^Rosenthal, M. L. The Modem Poets: A Critical Introduction. New York, 1965.

Routh, H. V. Towards the Twentieth Century: Essays in the Spiritual History of the Nineteenth. New York, 1937.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World As Will and Representation, II. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. Indian Hills, Colorado, 1958.

Stevenson, Lionel. Darwin Among the Poets. Chicago, 1932.

Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be. New Haven, 1952.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and The Modern World. New York, 1925.

Willey, Basil. Darwin and Butler: Two Versions of Evolution. London, i960.

. More Nineteenth Century Studies: A Group of Honest Doubters. New York, 1956.

______. Nineteenth Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold. New York, 1949.

Williams, Charles. Poetry At Present. Oxford, 1930.

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780-1950. New York, 1958. 127

Young, G. M. Last Essays. London, 1950.

______. Victorian England : Portrait of An Age. London, 1953.

B. THOMAS HARDY

Bailey, Joseph Osler. "Evolutionary Meliorism in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy," Studies in Philology, LX (July, 1963), 569-87.

______. Thomas Hardy and the Cosmic Mind. Chapel Hill, 1956.

Baker, Howard. "Hardy’s Poetic Certitude," Southern Review, VI (Summer 1940), 49-63.

Barzun, Jacques. "Truth and Poetry in Thomas Hardy," Southern Review, VI (Sumner, 1940), 179-92.

Blackmur, R. P. "The Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy," Southern Review, VI (Summer, 1940), 20-48.

Blunden, Edmund. Thomas Hardy. New York, 1942.

Bowra, C. M. The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy. Nottingham, 1946.

Brennecke, Ernest. Thomas Hardy♦s Universe. Boston, 1924.

Brown, Douglas. Thomas Hardy. London, 1954.

Carpenter, Richard. "Hardy’s Dramatic Narrative Poems," English Litera­ ture in Transition, IX (1966), 185-6,

______. Thomas Hardy. New York, 1964.

Chakravarty, A. "The Dynasts" and Post War Age in Poetry. Oxford University, 1938.

Chew, Samuel C. Thomas Hardy : Poet and Novelist. New York, 1929.

Collins, V. H. "The Love Poetry of Thomas Hardy," Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XXVIII (1942), 69-83.

Duffin, H. C. Thomas Hardy: A Study of the Wessex Novels, the Poems, and The Dynasts. Manchester, 1937.

Glicksberg, Charles I. "Hardy’s Scientific Pessimism," Western Humanities Review, VI (1952), 273-83.

Guerard, Albert J., ed. Hardy : A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1963. 128

Guerard, Albert J„ "The Illusion of Simplicity: The Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy," Sewanee Review, LXXII (1964), 363-89.

Hardy, Florence Emily. The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1891. New York, 1928.

______. The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928. New York, 1930.

Hardy, Thomas. Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy. New York, 1958.

Hicks, Granville. "Was Thomas Hardy a Pessimist?" Educational Forum, II (November, 1937), 58-67.

Howe, Irving. "The Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy," Southern Review, II (Autumn, 1966), 878-905.

Hynes, Samuel. The Pattern of Hardy’s Poetry. Chapel Hill, 1962.

Leavis, F. R. "Hardy the Poet," Southern Review, VI (Summer, 1940), 87-98.

Lewis, C. Day. "The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy," Proceedings of the British Academy, XXXVII (1951), 155-174.

McDowall. Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study. London, 1931.

Mayers, D. E. "Dialectical Structures in Hardy’s Poems," Victorian News Letter (Spring, 1965), 15-18.

Morrell, Roy. Thomas Hardy: The Will and the Way. Kuala Lumpur, 1965.

Orel, Harold. Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings. Lawrence, Kansas, 1966.

Pelham, Edgar. "The Hardy Centenary," Queen’s Quarterly, XLVII (1940), 277=87.

Purdy, Richard Little. Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study. London, 1954.

Ransom, John Crowe. "Honey and Gall," Southern Review, VI (Summer, 1940), 2-19.

______ed. Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy. New York, 1961.

______. "Thomas Hardy’s Poems and the Religious Difficulties of a Naturalist," Kenyon Review, XXII (Spring, 1960), 169-93. 129

Roberts, Marguerite. "The Dramatic Element in Hardy’s Poetry," Queen’s Quarterly, LI (Winter, 1944-45), 429-38.

Schwartz, Delmore. "Poetry and Belief in Thomas Hardy," Southern Review, VI (Summer, 1940), 64-77.

Scott, Nathan A., Jr. "The Literary Imagination and the Victorian Crisis of Faith: The Example of Thomas Hardy," Journal of Religion, XL' (October, 1960), 267-81.

Tate, Allen. "Hardy’s Philosophic Metaphors," Southern Review, VI (Sunmer, 1940), 99-108.

TeetSp Bruce. "Thomas Hardy’s Reflective Poetry," English Literature In Transition, IX (1966), 183-85.

„Van Doren, Mark. "The Poems of Thomas Hardy," in Don Cameron Allen’s Four Poets on Poetry. Baltimore, 1960, pp. 83-107.

Wöber, Carl J. Hardy of Wessex: His Life and Literary Career. New York, 1965.

______., ed. Hardy’s Love Poems. London and New York, 1963.

Webster, Harvey Curtis. On a Darkling Plain. Chicago, 1947.

Young, G. M., ed. Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy. London, 1962.

Zabel, Morton Dauwen. "Hardy In Defense of His Art: The Aesthetic of Incongruity," Southern Review, VI (Summer, 1940), 125-149.

C. A. E. HOUSMAN

Allison, A. F. "The Poetry of A. E. Housman," Review of Eng11sh Studies, XIX (1943), 277-84.

Bishop, John Peale. "The Poetry of A, E. Housman," Poetry LVI (June, 1940) , 144-53.

Brooks, Benjamin G. "A. E. Housman’s Collected Poetry," Nineteenth Century, CXXVIII (July, 1940), 71-76.

Brooks, Cleanth. "The Whole of Housman," Xenyon Review, III (Winter, 1941) , 105-09.

Davidson, Eugene. "The Span of Housman’s Poetry," Yale Review, XXVI (December, 1936), 404-06.

Edgren, Hobart C. "A Hardy-Housman Parallel," Notes and Queries, New Series, I (1954), 126. 130

Franklin, Ralph. "Housman’s Shropshire," Modern Language Quarterly, XXIV (1963), 164-71.

Green, Andrew J. "A Shropshire Lad," College English, V (October, 1943), 40.

Haber, Tom Burns. A. E. Housman. New York, 1967.

"A. E. Housman: Astronomer-Poet," English Studies, XXXV (1954), 154-58.

______. "A. E. Housman’s Downward Eye," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LIII (April, 1954), 308-18.

______. "Housman’s Poetic Ear," Poet Lore, XIV (1948), 257-69.

. "How Poetic is Housman’s Poetry?," Modern Language Notes, LXVII (1952), 551-2.

_____ . "The Spirit of the Perverse in A. E. Housman," South Atlantic Quarterly, XL (October, 1941), 368-78.

Hawkins, Maude M. A. E, Housman: Man Behind A Mask. Chicago, 1958.

Housman, A. E. The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman. New York, 1965.

Macklem, Michael. "The Elegiac Theme in Housman," Queen’s Quarterly, LIX (Spring, 1952), 39-52.

MacNeice, Louis. "Housman In Retrospect," New Republic, CII (29 April 1940), 583.

Marlow, Norman. A. E. Housman: Scholar and Poet. Minneapolis, 1958.

McKenzie, Emory Jariel. "The Philosophy of A. E. Housman’s Poetry," Dissertation Abstracts, XXIII, 3899 (Nebraska).

Molson, Hugh. "The Philosophy of Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman," Quarterly Review, CCLXVIII (1937), 205-13.

Muir, Edwin. "A. E. Housman," London Mercury, XXXV (November, 1936), 62-3.

Priestley, J. B. "The Poetry of A. E. Housman," London Mercury, VII (December, 1922), 171-84.

Richards, Grant. Housman: 1897-1936. Oxford, 1941.

Rockwell, Kiffin Ayres. "A. E. Housman, Poet-Scholar," Classical Journal, LII (1956), 145-8. 131

Scott-Kilvert, Ian. A. E. Housman. London, 1955.

Seigel, Jules Paul. "A. E. Housman’s Modification of the Flower Motif of the Pastoral Elegy," Victorian Poetry, II (Winter, 1964), 47-50.

Stevenson, John W. "The Martyr as Innocent: Housman*s Lonely Lad," South Atlantic Quarterly, LVII (Winter, 1958), 69-85.

______. "The Pastoral Setting in the Poetry of A. E. Housman," South Atlantic Quarterly, LV (October, 1956), 487-500.

Tinker, C. B. "Mr. Housman on Poetry," Yale Review, XXIII (September, 1933), 167-9.

Whitridge, Arnold. "Vigny and Housman: Study in Pessimism," American Scholar, X (1941), 156-69.

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