Een State University U3bary 31^^71 Ii 428619
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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"^.