English: Journal of the English Association, 2021, vol. 00 no. 0, pp. 1–23 doi: 10.1093/english/efab006 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 MOMENTS OF (RE)VISION: THOMAS HARDY MAKING AMENDS1 Eva Dema*
Abstract Considered far less critically rewarding resources than those of the author’s prose, the manuscripts of Thomas Hardy’s verse have long been neglected. This essay seeks, in part, to challenge the ways in which we attribute signifi- cance to such documents, attempting a close textual study of the ‘fair’ copy of Moments of Vision (1917) – a late draft of the volume only minimally revised. The collection is one which invites us to attend to the hitherto overlooked, and in remaining attentive to the seemingly minor alterations of the manuscript itself, I work to uncover Hardy’s attempt to address an oversight of his own. Focusing upon the poems penned for Emma follow- ing her death, I read them against the narrative which has traditionally sur- rounded them: one of a re-visioning of a period of discontent. The manu- script’s revisions are rather those which work against the initial impulse to smooth over animosity, striving consistently to paint a harsher version of events, and to acknowledge differences now past alteration. The way in which an endlessly mutable form allows for reflection upon an ‘immutable’ division holds central focus, as I trace the ways in which this tension com- plicates the long-established view of the Emma verses as an ‘expiation’. I suggest, rather, that in keeping with a much wider sensibility found running through Hardy’s verse, these revisions work to undermine his attempt to offer the famously neglected Emma a long overdue attention; they are amendments, in short, which problematize the very possibility of amends.
‘Men commonly think [...] that amendment is an expiation.’ - John Henry Newman, Parochial Sermons (1839)2
* Correspondence to Eva Dema, University of Cambridge, UK 1 Significant thanks are owed to both Ruth Abbott and Marcus Waithe for their invaluable feedback on early drafts, and to the two anonymous reviewers for English for their insightful comments. 2 John Henry Newman, Parochial Sermons, 4th edn, 8 vols (London: James Burns, 1849), iv, p. 111. Emphasis original. Hardy was greatly interested in Newman’s writings, which can be found transcribed across his notebooks.
# The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] 2 EVA DEMA I Rain is a transient occurrence: when it falls, we know it will pass. Sketching Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 his lover in the rain, Thomas Hardy inhabits a moment where the transient becomes fixed. In the summer of 1870, only a few months into their court- ship, Hardy and Emma Gifford had walked out along Beeny Cliff, where they found themselves caught amidst the drizzling wet. Having stood by to trace the outlines of his future wife, Hardy would later find his sketch inspir- ing a poem titled ‘The Figure in the Scene’ – a meditation on this delicate drawing ‘marked’ by rainfall.3 The image now ‘stained’ with ‘blots en- grained’, otherwise ‘drifting’ droplets lie rooted to the page. Placing the fixed and the fleeting into a strange relation, the poem’s rainfall seems to seep across its lines; thoughts of both fixity and impermanence run throughout – the couple’s ‘soon pass[ing] stay’ pitted against an irrevocably altered sketch – and come to settle upon the image of Emma as an ‘immutable’ figure amidst the scene. Yet immutability, that which is ‘unchangeable, unalterable, changeless’, is curiously countered by the act of composition.4 In turning to the holograph of Moments of Vision (1917), we find that what seems firmly set in print was not always so. The word ‘immutable’ was, in fact, Hardy’s fifth choice of wording in this late draft alone. In our tidy, printed editions of the work we read:
Soon passed our stay; Yet her rainy form is the Genius still of the spot, Immutable, yea, Though the place now knows her no more, and has known her not Ever since that day.
In the manuscript, Hardy writes:
Soon passed our ‘Twas but a stay; Yet her form rainy form Of minutes in the rain is the Genius still of the spot, Immutable [inseparable] [Inscribed] As pictured, yea, [there permanent] Though the place now knows her no more, & has known her not
3 Thomas Hardy, ‘The Figure in the Scene’, in The Variorum Edition of the Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. by James Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1979), p. 476; hereafter CP. 4 ‘Immutable’, OED Online,
Emma’s final status of ‘immutable’, then, is arrived at only through the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 very mutability of the text, with Hardy’s reflections on fixity facilitated by a process of revision. Focusing on the so-called ‘Emma poems’, this essay suggests that Hardy’s revisions to Moments of Vision – his manipulation of textual mutability – simi- larly enables an arrival at the immutable. His estrangement from Emma is well-documented, a period of ‘unrelieved alienation and bitterness’ long dis- cussed in relation to the ‘Poems of 1912-13’ (1914).6 But this collection was, as Paul Zietlow observes, ‘only the beginning of a flood’;7 it is Moments of Vision, in fact, which houses the greatest number of works inspired by Emma.8 The 1914 collection has often been viewed as an attempt to re-vi- sion a period of animosity: Ross C. Murfin writes of its tendency toward ‘anti-reality’ and ‘self-delusion’;9 Jahan Ramazani of its ‘narcissistic fantasies’ and ‘wish-fulfilment[s]’;10 Peter Widdowson of its ‘forging a new reality out of a lost, fading, and unfulfilled past’.11 The step from revision to re-vision- ing, too, is a tempting one to make. Harry Berger, for instance, has explicitly noted Robert Frost’s process of revision to be an ‘imaginative act’ through which the poet could ‘re-vision’;12 David Ben-Merre’s study of Yeats’s rest- less editorial process offers a means of ‘re-visioning lyric poetry’;13 whilst Charles Bazerman more generally asks ‘Yet for all its defined activity and craft, revision contains a mystery: How can this seeing again, this re-visioning come about?’14 Whilst discourses around revision thus map rather neatly
5 Cambridge, Magdalene College Old Library, MS N.5.1, fol. 78r; transcribed by permission of the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Square brackets denote words erased, rather than struck through. 6 William Morgan, ‘Form, Tradition, and Consolation in Hardy’s “Poems of 1912-13”’, PMLA, 89 (1974), 496–505 (p. 503). 7 Paul Zietlow, Moments of Vision: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 184. 8 See Carl J. Weber, Hardy of Wessex: His Life and Literary Career, 2nd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 259. 9 Ross C. Murfin, ‘Moments of Vision: Hardy’s “Poems of 1912-13”’, Victorian Poetry,20 (1982), 73–84 (pp. 74–76). 10 Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning (London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 57– 59. 11 Peter Widdowson, Thomas Hardy (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2007), p. 86. 12 Harry Berger Jr., ‘Poetry as Revision: Interpreting Robert Frost’, Criticism, 10 (1968), 1–22 (p. 7). 13 David Ben-Merre, ‘The Brawling of a Sparrow in the Eaves: Vision and Revision in W. B. Yeats’, Journal of Modern Literature, 31 (2008), 71–85 (p. 71). 14 Charles Bazerman, ‘Preface’, in Revision: History, Theory, and Practices, ed. by Alice Horning and Anne Becker (West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2006), pp. xi–xiii (p. xii). 4 EVA DEMA onto those which have come to surround the Emma poems, it is not the in- tent here to thread these two established strands together. For in spite of what the rose-tinted yearnings of the ‘Poems of 1912-13’ might suggest, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 Hardy was not always one for indulging in fantasy. In the late work ‘A Second Attempt’, his choice of title prompts immediate thoughts of revision, and yet the poem concludes with a starkly contrasting warning: ‘Twice-over cannot be!’ (CP, p. 752). Indeed, even the ‘Poems of 1912-13’ open with the similarly sober acknowledgement that, ‘All’s past amend/unchangeable’ (CP, p. 339), and it is this notion of immutability I refer to throughout, trac- ing a series of revisions which reinforce a division beyond reconciliation. They are revisions which move not toward re-visioning, but a pained ac- knowledgement that the mutability revision affords is not to be echoed through Emma: she is fixed in death, and their differences are now unbridge- able. Such a re-reading, however, will prompt further reconsiderations, in particular of our understanding of the supposed purpose of these verses. For though this outpouring of poetry has traditionally been read to expiate Hardy’s marital wrongdoing, here I suggest that his amendments work rather to problematize the possibility of offering Emma amends.
II Composed of loose sheets which were subsequently arranged and bound, the manuscript of Moments of Vision is housed in the Old Library of Magdalene College, Cambridge, where Hardy had been made an honorary fellow in 1913. Like most of the remaining manuscripts of Hardy’s verse, it was origin- ally the printer’s copy; neatly bound in black leather, measuring 9"x10", its revisions begin with the title itself: a tipped-in slip reveals Hardy toying with the potential headings Moments from the Years, and Moments of Vision and other Poetry, before settling upon Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses. While some poems in the collection are entirely unrevised, and others show the al- teration of only a few words or punctuation marks, many reveal a poet ago- nising over particular lines found altered multiple times in one draft, whilst others yet display the late addition of entire stanzas. Unsurprisingly, the revi- sions encountered in the manuscript mark neither the first nor the final made to these verses; once the holograph was returned to Hardy by the printer he continued revising immediately, and just a month after the volume was pub- lished would submit a list of further edits to Macmillan – the first of three sets to be made to the volume.15
15 See The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, ed. by Samuel Hynes, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), i, p. xvi. MOMENTS OF (RE)VISION 5 While Florence Hardy may have been amongst the first to note her hus- band’s ‘artistic inability to rest content with anything that he wrote’, she was certainly not the last.16 Dubbed a ‘meticulous writer’, ‘an indefatigable re- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 viser’, and an author who made ‘infinite pains [...] over the details of [a] text’, Hardy’s tendency toward alteration has continued to draw considerable critical attention, and places him firmly in step with his modernist contempo- raries.17 As Hannah Sullivan observes: ‘Modernist writers revised overtly, passionately, and at many points in the lifespan of their texts’, having ‘over- come the nineteenth-century preference for writing that was, or at least seemed to be, spontaneous’.18 Her seminal study of modernist revision, how- ever, remains curiously absent of any consideration of Hardy, despite exam- ining a number of his contemporaries, including Eliot, James and Joyce.19 The established argument on Hardy’s revision practices thus remains that of Simon Gatrell’s Hardy the Creator (1988), which suggests that a ‘gap between concept and achievement’, between an idea and its written execution, was one which Hardy tirelessly, and fruitlessly, strove to bridge through revi- sion.20 Focusing exclusively on Hardy’s ‘career as a writer of fiction’, how- ever, Gatrell’s work does not simply overlook the poetry, but somewhat minimizes its value to discussion of the author’s revisions.21 Reflecting on Hardy’s late career transition from prose to verse, Gatrell speculates that the compression of the latter form may have afforded Hardy a greater precision of expression, thus curtailing the need for revision: ‘the gap between concept and achievement which had concerned him increasingly in fiction from 1881 onwards could be made much narrower in poetry’.22 And yet, the suggestion that poetry even minimally relieved Hardy’s im- pulse to revise is easily countered by a glance at his manuscripts. His practice of poetic composition, as summarized by Dalziel and Millgate, is just as
16 Cited in Gibson, p. xxiii. 17 Suleiman M. Ahmad, ‘Thomas Hardy’s Last Revision of A Pair of Blue Eyes’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 72 (1978), 109–12 (p. 112); Alan L. Manford, ‘Thomas Hardy’s Later Revisions in “A Pair of Blue Eyes”’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 76 (1982), 209–20 (p. 210); Charles Lock, ‘‘The Darkling Thrush’ and the Habit of Singing’, Essays in Criticism, 36 (1986), 120–41 (p. 118). 18 Hannah Sullivan, The Work of Revision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 2–3. 19 Hardy’s omission from Sullivan’s work is, perhaps, a consequence of his lingering status as something of a misfit modernist. See, for example, Tim Armstrong, ‘Thomas Hardy’, in A Companion to Modernist Poetry, ed. by David E. Chinitz and Gail McDonald (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2014), pp. 323–34. 20 Simon Gatrell, Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 225. 21 Ibid., p. ix. 22 Ibid., p. 225. 6 EVA DEMA restless as in prose: he would make rough drafts of poems, destroying them once a more finished version was achieved, before embarking on a cycle of recopying and rewriting pre-publication, and most often after.23 Moments of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 Vision was one of several works of verse he continued to alter post-print, and his letters reveal a traffic of communication with publishers, expressing an ‘impatience’ to revise.24 Writing to Arthur Symons, he says of The Dynasts (1904): ‘I published it with much misgiving [...] I am hunting up a few records, &c., as if I meant to finish it’ (Letters, iii, p. 126). Midway through Moments of Vision, too, we find ‘Begun 1871. Finished ____.’ fittingly scrawled at the bottom of ‘Love the Monopolist’, a poem already sent to print.25 Publication and completion, then, were not synonymous terms for Hardy, whether dealing in verse or prose. Critics, however, have continued to follow Gatrell’s lead in confining their focus almost exclusively to the amendments of Hardy’s fiction. What little work does exist on Hardy’s poet- ic revision, meanwhile, often testifies to Sullivan’s notion of the ‘ossification’ of textual criticism into ‘reductive claims about literary value’.26 Writing on the manuscript for Wessex Poems (1898), for example, Kenneth Marsden makes explicit ‘the connection between value and revision’, lamenting the ‘inferior’ nature of Hardy’s less revised texts;27 likewise, Frank Giordano’s examination of ‘The Three Tall Men’ deems the published version a ‘more satisfying work’, devoid of the earlier draft’s ‘weaknesses’: ‘Clearly, the pub- lished poem is superior to anything promised by the draft’s variant phrasings.’28 But, in considering the potential implications of Hardy’s revisions, these works do, at least, venture where other criticism will not. James Gibson’s edition of the poetry offers the manuscripts’ textual variants as footnotes, but he maintains: ‘I have regarded it as my duty to give the facts, not to interpret them’.29 This curious distancing gestures toward a wider critical hesitancy to do other than record these revisions, and Samuel Hynes’s edition of the verse – another which offers extensive documentation of amendment – may give a clue as to why:
23 Thomas Hardy’s ‘Poetical Matter’ Notebook, ed. by Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xxi. 24 The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, 8 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2012), ii, p. 84; hereafter Letters. 25 MS N.5.1, fol. 84r. See also CP, p. 479. 26 Sullivan, pp. 57–58. 27 Kenneth Mardsen, The Poems of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Introduction (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 191; p. 189. 28 Frank Giordano, ‘Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Three Tall Men’’, Colby Library Quarterly,9 (1971), 247–56 (p. 253; p. 249). 29 Gibson, p. xxiii. MOMENTS OF (RE)VISION 7 One point should be clear from this account of Hardy’s poetic career: he was a lifelong reviser of his poems. But though they might be said to have been in a constant process of revision, individual changes in the texts were rarely exten- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 sive. Hardy did not ‘remake himself’, as Yeats and Auden did; it would be nearer the mark to say that he tried to make himself more himself, by correcting and improving what he had written, rewriting a line, altering a word, improv- ing a rhyme.30
Though Hynes’s wider introduction paints a clear picture – one of Hardy bent over his verse with the same restlessly revising hand long thought to hover over his prose – his imposition of a rather weighty ‘but’ pits the assumed importance of lifelong revision against supposedly insignificant alter- ations. Other critics have since followed suit, with Phillip Mallett, for in- stance, imposing a substantial ‘but’ or two of his own: ‘The textual differences [...] are real and interesting, but they are also relatively small: Hardy was a lifelong reviser of his texts, but the changes made to the poems rarely extend beyond the rewriting of a line or a word.’31 As Mallett goes on to describe the revisions made to Hardy’s novels as ‘extensive’, ‘substantial’, ‘complicated’, and ‘complex’, the poetry is left comparatively dismissed.32 The discourse surrounding Hardy’s poetic revisions merely extends a pat- tern clouding discussions of revision more generally. Helen Gardner’s study of the manuscripts of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (housed, alongside Hardy’s, at Magdalene College), presents a useful point of comparison. ‘I was tempted at the beginning to be selective’, she writes, ‘and to print only those passages and readings from the drafts which seemed to me to be significant, fearing that they might be buried under a mass of trivialities’.33 Yet, despite conclud- ing ‘it was my duty to make the material available and not to impose my own criterion of significance upon it’,34 Gardner proceeds throughout to refer to particular revisions as ‘insignificant’ or ‘trifling’, ‘minor’ or ‘slight’.35 The lat- ter two terms are also shared by Gatrell, who deploys them to wave off the seemingly more uninteresting of Hardy’s amendments.36 Some revisions are, of course, aptly described as minimal, and given that Hardy’s verse manu- scripts are all fair copies – relatively ‘clean’ drafts produced for the printer –
30 Hynes, i, p. xx. 31 Phillip Mallett, ‘Preface’, in Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. by Phillip Mallett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. xvii–xx (p. xxi). 32 Ibid., p. xxii. 33 Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. vi. 34 Ibid., p. xxii. 35 See, for examples of each, p. 199; p. 178; p. 39; p. 16. 36 See Gatrell, p. 83; p. 185. 8 EVA DEMA this is not to be denied. Indeed, the assumption that there exists a correlation between a manuscript’s clutter and its critical value is a natural one to make, and one which continues to be made; equations of volume and significance Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 frequently underscore discussions of revision, as the extent of alteration dic- tates our critical interest. But for a manuscript like Moments of Vision, ‘fair’ feels a misleading term, one encouraging us to fall into further assumptions of (in)significance. Gardner’s discussion of Eliot, for instance, is overtly dismis- sive of such documents:
It is in those drafts which are in the nature of ‘fair copies’ that [Eliot] gave his mind to problems of punctuation. For the benefit of those who are not inter- ested in changes in a preposition or alterations of punctuation I have signalized by an asterisk readings which are the subject of discussion in the commentary.37
This essay, meanwhile, strives to redirect attention toward the seemingly minor, in the hopes of unveiling the often impressive weight which might lie behind a changed preposition; the potentially monumental shifts enacted by the addition of a mere determiner; and the easily missed significance of an altered pronoun or relocated comma. It aims, in short, to refrain from mak- ing reflexive dismissals. Moments of Vision is, after all, a collection which invites us to consider the overlooked, whether Emma herself, or the revisions her neglect inspired.38
III Hardy’s largest volume of offerings to Emma, Moments of Vision contains at least thirty-three poems thought to be directly inspired by her passing.39 As a sub-collection, these verses encompass the manuscript’s wider range of revi- sion: ‘The Wound’, for example, is an entirely fair copy, while ‘The Wind’s Prophecy’ undergoes 14 emendations in the manuscript, and a further 14 be- fore final publication.40 One of only five Emma poems untouched in the holograph, however, ‘The Wound’ remains firmly in the unrevised minority. For, as ‘Looking at a Picture on an Anniversary’ suggests:
37 Gardner, p. vi. 38 Heather Brink-Roby similarly notes that ‘Moments of Vision is itself concerned with the overlooked; with minute details of nature, with that which has long been underground, with obscure persons, or with the stories behind homely objects’. However, her study makes no mention of Emma. See ‘Literary Magdalene: Thomas Hardy’, Magdalene College Libraries, 19 August 2016,
little I care To live myself, my dear, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 -labouring In loneliness here!’41
Just as ‘loneliness’ here leads quite literally to ‘lone-labouring’, the wider manuscript reveals a loss which has resulted in a particularly laborious process of revision. What these amendments offer varies from poem to poem, and, as suggested, no blanket conclusion can be thrown across them all; the manu- script remains a document filled with contradictions and complexities, and, one suspects, a number of divergent narratives waiting to be uncovered. The aim here is to trace one thread of intent through multiple poems, where a mutable form has afforded a guilt-ridden poet the opportunity to unveil, ra- ther than obscure, estrangements now ‘past amend/unchangeable’. Palpably aching to resketch the scene it describes, few poems appear as in- tensely regretful of division as ‘We Sat at the Window’. Given a subheading of ‘Bournemouth, 1875’, it is rooted in a specific locality, in a scene we are led to believe really unfolded. Such addendums are common with Hardy, and can often lead to unchallenged acceptance of a poem’s fidelity to events as they occurred. Paul Zietlow, for example, writes of ‘Near Lanivet, 1872’: ‘This all actually happened, as the factual title indicates, near Lanivet in 1872; it cannot be denied.’42 After consideration of the manuscript, however, such conclusions feel a little too trusting. If ‘Lanivet, 1872’ implies truth, then so ought ‘Bournemouth, 1875’, and yet the revisions made to ‘We Sat at the Window’ reveal a path far less clear cut than memory to page. Instead, we discover one scene unfolding beneath another, the impulsive desire to soften accusatory glances facing a revising hand’s dedication to a harsher version of events. The scene runs thus: having moved into a new home in Bournemouth shortly after their honeymoon, Hardy and Emma silently face the window, engrossed by the pouring rain:
We sat at the window looking out, the And ^ rain came down like silken strings That Swithin’s day. Each gutter & spout Babbled unchecked in the busy way Of witless things:
41 MS N.5.1, fol. 169r. See also CP, p. 533. 42 Zietlow, pp. 213–14. 10 EVA DEMA Nothing to read, nothing to see Seemed in that room for her & me On Swithin’s day. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 by the scene, by eachother; yes. Yes; We were irked, at its nothingness, For I did not know, nor did she infer How much there was to read & guess prize By her in me, & to see & crown [see] By me in her. Wasted were two souls in their prime, And great was the waste, that July time When the rain came down.43
The gentle alliteration of ‘silken strings/That Swithin’s day’ rather abruptly sours: within the course of a line, caesura has marked a sharp turn toward the harsher onomatopoeic spluttering of ‘gutter and spout/Babbled unchecked’. By the time the alliterative ‘s’ forges its return in ‘spout’, all gentleness has dissipated, with the source of discontent first located in the scene outside: ‘we were irked at its nothingness’. Alteration shifts the blame: ‘we were irked by the scene, by eachother; yes’. As the relocated ‘yes’ provides a sense of begrudging confession, later revisions will further sharpen the divide: ‘we were irked by the scene, by our own selves; yes’. Reciprocal disdain now paired with self-repulsion, ‘our’ retains a sense of mutuality to the irritation, replacing the original line’s more obscure ‘it’ – a depersonalised pronoun which would place fault firmly outside the couple themselves. These gradual linguistic alterations work to recast not only the surface of a poem, but often its underlying structures, in some cases entirely transforming the metre. It seems surprising, then, that while the body of work surrounding Hardy’s versification has continued to grow, little note has been taken of the manuscripts which might shed significant light upon this area of interest.44 Dennis Taylor’s rigorous and influential study of Hardy’s ‘fascination with metrical form’, for instance, speaks often of ‘verse skeletons’ – a term Hardy used to reference a ‘metrical norm’ to be disrupted – but says almost nothing of what might be termed ‘verse ghosts’: the metrical choices which lie be-
43 MS N.5.1, fol. 4r. See also CP, p. 428. 44 See, for example, John Hughes, ‘Metre and Mourning: ‘Thomas Hardy’s “The Going” and Poems of 1912-13’, Hardy Review, 17 (2015), 19–34; and Alan Lodge, ‘Thomas Hardy and Metrical Psalmody’, The Thomas Hardy Journal, 25 (2009), pp. 127–35. MOMENTS OF (RE)VISION 11 neath those allowed to emerge in publication, found only in earlier drafts.45 In the case of ‘We Sat at the Window’, such ghosts cast interesting shadows. Take the opening line of the second stanza, which we have seen after two Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 alterations reads: ‘We were irked by the scene, by our own selves; yes’. An addition of two syllables to the original line, the change marks the beginning of a substantial disruption to the metre. With the poem comprised of only two stanzas, the syllable count of the first runs: 9, 9, 9, 9, 4, 8, 8, 4; the se- cond: 11, 10, 8, 9, 4, 8, 9, 5. The neat patterning of the first feels too tidy, al- most a metrical smoothing over of disharmony, in sly collusion with the ambiguous ‘it’. With the second stanza originally opening with a line of nine syllables, it appears initially set to follow suit. But as Hardy’s revisions move toward revelation of a mutual disdain, the metre takes its cue; beginning a disruption to the scene of its own, it now offers a mirror to thematic discord. ‘We Sat at the Window’ plays upon a familiar and favourite tension of Hardy’s – one found in such poems as ‘Between Us Now’ (CP, p. 136) – in which he situates lovers in physical proximity, only to hold them emotional gulfs apart. Ever the fan of George Meredith, Hardy seems to echo a poign- ant line from Modern Love (1862): ‘They sat, she laughing at a quiet joke’.46 Meredith’s subtle yet fatal shift from a collective ‘they’ to an individual ‘she’ not only recalls the tension between physical proximity and emotional dis- tance found in ‘We Sat at the Window’, but touches upon its revealing pre- occupation with pronouns. In each variation of ‘we were irked ...’, the collective ‘we’ remains a permanent fixture; ringing with irony, the sense of communality it offers is placed steadfast in a line which, with each alteration, pushes two lovers further apart. Indeed, pronouns seem up to something strange in this poem: ‘we’ and ‘our’ never feel quite collective or cohesive, and find themselves pitted against the ever revolving ‘her and me’, ‘her in me’, ‘me in her’. On the surface, these pronoun pairings appear to convey unity, yet the prepositions placed between them feel increasingly like threads – or perhaps ‘silken strings’ – barely holding these distant figures together. As ‘her’ and ‘me’ are jostled around the page, we get the sense of a poet trying almost to fit two misshapen puzzle pieces together, rotating them with each iteration, in a desperate bid to make them fall into place. Yet ‘[w]asted were two souls in their prime,’ the present Hardy remains conscious, ‘And great was the waste’: bearing the weight of this foreknowledge, he reaches pitifully back into the past, trying in vain to piece together those destined to remain apart.
45 Dennis Taylor, Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 3; pp. 41. 46 George Meredith: Selected Poems, ed. by Keith Hanley (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988), p. 33. 12 EVA DEMA In so many of these poems, Hardy’s pen begins to bend under the weight of what he now knows and cannot change, his memories distorted by the burden of hindsight. In this sense, as well as its shared preoccupation with Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 pronouns, ‘The Musical Box’ is a work which feels in conversation with ‘We Sat at the Window’, as its remorseful, retrospective refrain insists: ‘I did not hear/I did not see’ (CP, pp. 482–83). Uttered by a man who has now heard and seen too late, he bemoans that all which once ‘seemed’ true has proven by the time of composition to be false. Three Hardys feel present in the poem: the Hardy of the past who walks with Emma, the helplessly narrating Hardy of the present, and a Hardy who cannot rest content with his fore- knowledge, but strives to impose it upon the poem. Though the draft in the manuscript is composed by the second, it faces the third’s revising pen. For whilst ‘we’ might have held its own amidst a cycle of revisions in ‘We Sat at the Window’, it proves much less firm in ‘The Musical Box’; the manuscript suggests that by the time Hardy came to revise the latter poem, he had aban- doned his initial intent to draw pronouns together, embarking instead upon a systematic erasure of the collective: ‘we had slowed along’ turns to ‘I had slowed along, ‘we descried’ to ‘I descried’, and ‘we had walked’ becomes simply ‘had walked’; all the while the ‘us’ of ‘she came to listen for us’ and ‘she scanned/us’ is rendered ‘me’ in both lines.47 The first Hardy may have thought his union ‘lifelong to be’, but a revising one knows better. Such changes may appear minor in isolation, but they quickly form part of a wider pattern of painful admission when we consider the manuscript as a whole. For a collection titled Moments of Vision, a surprising amount of dwell- ing is made upon blindness and oversight, with the loaded ‘seemed’ and deaf ears making a return, alongside further guilt-ridden confessions, in ‘Near Lanivet, 1872’. Emma’s spiritual depletion is here imagined as a crucifixion Hardy helplessly witnesses, but as retrospective regret leads to retroactive revisions, he gestures more openly toward his part in Emma’s decline: ‘her look as one crucified/as I gazed at her’ alters to ‘in my gaze at her’, the cruci- fixion relocated to Hardy’s eyes, no longer an event he passively witnesses, but implicitly an action of his own.48 In ‘An Upbraiding’, meanwhile, Emma is left, we feel knowingly, to ask: ‘When you are dead [...] will you be cold/ As when we lived, or how?’49 Hardy seems, through revision, to provide an answer. Whilst Emma’s phantom initially awaits the time ‘When you are dead, & we shall be/Not differenced’, her hopes face modification: ‘When you are dead, & stand to me/Not differenced’. In the original line, we are offered what reads as a reflection upon their marriage – a hope that mutual
47 MS N.5.1, fols 90r-91r. 48 MS N.5.1, fol. 17r. See also CP, p. 436. 49 MS N.5.1, fol. 167r. See also CP, p. 532. MOMENTS OF (RE)VISION 13 contempt in life will be forgotten in death, ‘not differenced’ taken to mean not in a state of dispute or confrontation. But the hopeful ‘we’ which seeks to draw them together is ruptured once more by revisions which hold them Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 apart. As the poem’s relentless semi-refrain progresses from first to second person – from ‘Now I am dead’ to ‘When you are dead’ – a transition from ‘I’ to ‘you’ is still not enough, amendment admits, to reinstate a communal ‘we’. The sheer vagueness of ‘or how?’ suggests Emma’s struggle to imagine Hardy as anything other than his old apathetic self, or perhaps a hesitancy, even, to expose herself to the optimism of such a vision. Hence, in the altered line, ‘not differenced’ reads more as a mere reflection on states of being, as Hardy now stands as ghostly as Emma, though the two remain just as distanced. Death, after all, was never the cause of their division. These poems thus recall an unbridged and now unbridgeable separation, with each admission arrived at through more than one kind of mutability. For whilst revision serves to heighten, or confess to, fraught moments, Hardy also reminds us that this estrangement was one which ultimately stemmed from a change of heart: his late apathy toward Emma was an indifference which followed interest, a fading of feeling. In ‘The Wind’s Prophecy’, therefore, a poem which charts the very genesis of their marriage, we en- counter twin mutabilities of form and emotion. Recalling Hardy’s first ex- cursion to St. Juliot in the spring of 1870, at that point believed to be engaged to Tryphena Sparks, it is thoughts of Phena which preoccupy Hardy as he journeys onward, unaware that Emma lies ahead. Normally averse to fixity, here he longs for permanence: for Tryphena to ‘stay’ forever his own. Yet these professions of secure emotion are undermined by the laughing wind, which blows that this love is set to prove the product of a mutable heart:
roam “I stray, but one is safely mine!” stay I say. “God grant she stand my own!” Low laughs the wind as if it grinned: thou’st “Thy Love is one thou hast not yet known.” 50
The connotations of infidelity aroused by ‘stray’ are only partially mediated by the replacement ‘roam’, and when ‘stay’ steps in for ‘stand’, we encounter revisions which reinforce ever-altering emotions. Calling out to the ghost rhyme of ‘stray’, ‘stay’ finds its sense of fixity undermined by this antonymic
50 MS N.5.1, fol. 111r. See also CP, p. 494. 14 EVA DEMA pairing; an erased choice now echoing over a late addition, a layered and troublesome reminder of mutability becomes built into the otherwise firm ‘stay’. This weakening of stability continues as ‘my eyes now as alway [sic]/ Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 Behold her ebon locks of hair’ becomes ‘my eyes now as all day/Behold her ebon loops of hair’, the eternal ‘alway’ made a paltry ‘all day’, and locks, with their latent pun on security, rendered flimsier loops. As Hardy journeys to- ward Emma, his love for another fades with every step, with every profession of supposedly firm feeling. Revising in 1917, Hardy makes each alteration in the knowledge that his love for Emma is to suffer the same fate.
IV ‘The Wind’s Prophecy’ is one of the manuscript’s most heavily revised poems. So heavily altered, in fact, that the poem’s initial addendum – the characteristically Hardyan ‘rewritten from old notes’ – needed late revision of its own: ‘rewritten from an old copy’. Speaking to the sense of transience at the heart of the poem, the altered addendum reveals a text so significantly revised that the initial draft is rendered a wholly separate variant. ‘The Figure in the Scene’, another to mine ‘old notes’, offers subtle reminder that such poems belong to a privileged medium: not all forms hold equal capacity for revision. The ‘immutable’ we opened with was, as mentioned, Hardy’s fifth choice of wording in this late draft, having settled upon and then discarded ‘as pictured’, ‘there permanent’, ‘inscribed’ and ‘inseparable’. Apparently in search of a word tied to fixity, ‘inscribed’ is a curious choice, its sense of per- manency dependent on ties to stone over paper, defined as ‘To write, mark, or delineate [...] in or on something; esp. so as to be conspicuous or durable, as on a monument, tablet, etc.’51 A form of composition far more fixed than poetry, inscription is evidently related in Hardy’s mind to the immutable, and gestures toward other modes of memorializing in which he was engaged whilst writing Moments of Vision. Hardy and Emma first met in Cornwall, where the latter’s brother-in-law was serving as rector of St. Juliot’s, the church which Hardy – then a budding architect – had been commissioned to help restore. Following Emma’s death in 1913, a memorial tablet would be designed by her grieving husband, and placed upon the north wall of the church which had first brought them to- gether:
TO THE DEAR MEMORY OF EMMA LAVINIA HARDY BORN GIFFORD
51 ‘Inscribe’, OED Online,
Chiselled between each word upon the tablet is the carved closure of an interpunct. To place an interpunct after a word suggests, in a sense, to have done with it, but as the inscription concludes ‘ERECTED BY HER HUSBAND 1913 ’, the final dot feels redundant: there is no following word from which ‘1913’ needs to stand apart. Its presence almost uncon- sciously anticipates Hardy’s ever itching hand, and warns these words are no longer to be tampered with. Hence, Hardy’s subsequent agony at the tablet’s glaring inadequacy was not to be addressed through the memorial’s revision, but the composition of two late poems: ‘The Marble Tablet’ and ‘The Monument-Maker’. Opening with a clause which might set the scene for lofty admiration, the former poem quickly succumbs to disappointment: ‘There it stands,’ Hardy writes, ‘though alas, what a little of her/Shows in its cold white look!’ (CP, p. 655). The poem laments that it is Emma’s verve – ‘her glance, glide, or smile’ – which the tablet fossilises: ‘The still marble, date-graven,/Gives all that it can, tersely lined’, but not enough. And, with a consistent rhyme scheme maintained throughout the poem, an unwavering regularity finds itself imposed upon a metre which remains determinedly ir- regular; mirroring the action of the tablet itself, rigidity overlies, and stifles, that which yearns to shift and writhe. For a poet that are so attached to revision, there must have been something disconcerting about words that are so set in stone. As Sullivan observes, ‘It is markedly easier to revise in some medial formats than others—a galley proof is easier to emend than [...] a stone inscription (which can only be erased with great difficulty).’52 Hardy, too, was likely familiar with all the resistances of the form, having frequently tried his own hand at chiselling.53 When both ‘The Marble Tablet’ and ‘The Monument-Maker’ came to be revised, then, it is imaginable they would have generated a strange consciousness that the two mediums at once held in question – poetry and stone – afforded very dif- ferent potentials for revision. Late alteration, for instance, would see the title
52 Sullivan, p. 8. 53 See Letters, iii, p. 137. 16 EVA DEMA of ‘The Marble Tablet’ modified from the original ‘The Marble Monument’, as Hardy at once diminishes the status of the failed tribute, whilst exercising the mutability it fails to offer. ‘The Monument-Maker’, meanwhile, envisions: Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021
I chiselled her monument To my mind’s content, [...] I stepped back, cheered, and thought its outlines fair, And its marbles rare. (CP, pp. 707–08)
As Emma’s phantom soon sends a mirthless laugh crashing through this satisfaction – ‘It spells not me!’ – the anti-revisionism of marble will resist the vitality not just of woman, but of text, leaving little for Hardy to do in the face of what Marjorie Garson has termed the ‘unforthcoming deadness of stone’.54 Stood bereft with chisel still in hand, he remains helpless to alter his inscription.
V When observed through the lens of revision, stone inscriptions stand as al- most the complete inversion of poetry, their fixity far removed from the end- lessly alterable nature of verse. And yet, this obvious disparity of form is countered by a unison of theme. In stone, it is a doubled sense of fixity which perturbs Hardy, as the stubbornness of inscription holds a natural mirror to the woman now fixed in death; in poetry, meanwhile, we find a contrasting- ly mutable form facilitating an arrival at the same conclusion of immutability. Given that Hardy did not travel to view the tablet until September 1916, at which time he was also busy composing and compiling the imminent Moments of Vision, perhaps the overwhelming fixity the monument attested to – the way in which it sets Emma quite literally in stone – influenced, if not overtly informed, the immutability she would inhabit in this concurrent volume. (‘The Figure in the Scene’, at the very least, shows thoughts of the ‘inscribed’ prefacing Emma’s ‘immutable’ status.) But while the church at St. Juliot itself has become something of a focal point for critics seeking to probe Hardy’s understanding of architectural restoration, it’s tablet in particular guides us toward reflection upon reparations of another kind.55 For the
54 Marjorie Garson, ‘Written in Stone: Hardy’s Grotesque Sublime’, in Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate, ed. by Keith Wilson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 96–117 (p. 108). 55 See, for example, Samantha Briggs, ‘Thomas Hardy and the Evolution of Architecture’, AA Files, 67 (2013), pp. 29–35; and Benjamin Cannon, ‘“The True Meaning of the Word MOMENTS OF (RE)VISION 17 strange sense of kinship Emma generates between these otherwise antithetical forms is one which also extends to their reception, her ghost levying kindred accusations at both. In ‘The Monument-Maker’, she berates Hardy’s efforts Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 in inscription: ‘you, who carve there your devotion;/But you felt none, my dear!’ In ‘An Upbraiding’, she exhibits a comparably grounded disdain for his ‘songs’:
Now I am dead you sing to me The songs we used to know, But while I lived you had no wish Or care for doing so.
In what reads as a thinly veiled jibe at the poetry itself – or at the very least, an accusation which inevitably implicates the verse – Emma’s disdain for Hardy’s turn to the metrical hints at a poet achingly aware that his inability to atone through stone had formed a failure his verse would not simply reflect upon, but share in. I want to think now, then, having reconsidered the underlying essence of Hardy’s poetry for Emma – which, through its amendments, reads less as an attempt to re-vision their years of discontent, than as a means of reiterating their irreconcilability – of how such a reconsideration, along with further at- tention to revision, might alter the way we understand the very purpose of these verses. Any reader of the ‘Poems of 1912-13’ is likely to have encoun- tered Hardy’s claim that the collection formed ‘the only amends I can make’ (Letters, v, p. 37) to the wife he felt he had wronged. Cited time and again, often alongside the still similar assertion that these works constituted an ‘expi- ation’, Hardy’s claim has done much to shape critical understanding of the Emma verses.56 J. O. Bailey, for instance, is one of many to take Hardy at his word: ‘His poems were, as he said, an “expiation” for his neglect and even his self-protective, exasperated unkindness toward her.’57 Though Hardy wrote over a hundred poems for Emma following her death, most have fallen under the shadow of the ‘Poems of 1912-13’, and are often understood through this same claim of atonement. And yet, the poems which followed this initial collection feel harder to read in the same light. Both ‘The Monument-Maker’ and ‘An Upbraiding’ form part of a wider vein of verses
Restoration”: Architecture and Obsolescence in Jude the Obscure’, Victorian Studies, 56 (2014), 201–24. 56 Cited in Richard Little Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 166. 57 J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), pp. 25. 18 EVA DEMA plagued by an acute consciousness of what Emma would make of these offer- ings; indeed, of what she might say to the suggestion that amends could be adequately made at all. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 What exactly Hardy had to atone for is well documented by both parties; Bailey touches on this ‘neglect’ – a longstanding indifference and inattentive- ness which finds ample admission across Moments of Vision, and is perhaps best summarised by the pained refrain of ‘The Musical Box’: ‘I did not hear/I did not see’. Emma herself, meanwhile, would bitterly counsel friends to ex- pect ‘neither gratitude, not attentions, love, nor justice’ from their hus- bands,58 whilst Florence Hardy later offered supporting testimony: ‘the 24th was the anniversary [...] of his first wife’s birthday—always forgotten during her lifetime.’59 In so many of the Emma poems, however, we find this indif- ference displaced: it is Emma who now stands apathetic, her immutability extending to the sense in which she is utterly ‘unmoved’ (CP, p. 533) by Hardy’s attempts at reparation. ‘Everything Comes’ puts the case most piti- fully: as the trees which Emma had longed for at Max Gate finally grow, Hardy desperately seeks credit for their planting – ‘As you wished, Dear?’ – but a dying Emma curtly replies: ‘Tis too late’(CP, p. 508).60 There is a palp- able sense that these three words speak to more than just the trees: whether stone, song, poem, or plant, the form in which Hardy offers his overdue at- tention remains rather irrelevant, and leaves a sad metatextuality underlying these verses, which almost knowingly form part of an offering which stands both belated and redundant. As Emma recurrently mirrors back the disinter- est Hardy once showed her, she seems in death to keep his wrongdoing alive, and in turn problematises the most central claim to have surrounded the works she inspired. It is a claim, however, which was always rather cautiously made. The letter in which Hardy famously referred to his poetry for Emma as ‘the only amends I can make’ is recurrently condensed to these six words, which, when taken thus in isolation, read as reasonably assured. In consulting the wider letter, however, we find them hedged in by hesitancies:
Some of them I rather shrink from printing — those I wrote just after Emma died, when I looked back at her as she had originally been, & when I felt mis- erable lest I had not treated her considerately in her latter life. However I shall publish them as the only amends I can make, if it were so. (Letters, v, p. 37)
58 Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy, ed. by Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 15. 59 Cited in Bailey, p. 25. 60 Emphasis found in the holograph version of the poem. MOMENTS OF (RE)VISION 19 Scattered through with qualifications – ‘lest’, ‘only’, ‘if it were so’ – the claim is somewhat undermined in the very instance it is made. Hardy’s inability to fully commit to a making of amends here might stem from a hesitancy to accept Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 wrongdoing, though—given his clear sense of guilt across these poems, and the notable ‘strength of [his] regret’ (CP, p. 434) – perhaps it flows from a sense of the offering’s incongruity. Jane Thomas, Claire Tomalin and Paul Turner have each figured literature as a root cause of Hardy’s inattention: ‘She was disap- pointed, neglected, discouraged, excluded, pushed aside and suffered very much’, Thomas writes of Emma, ‘from being the partner for the best part of 42 years of a famous man who was married to his work’.61 Tomalin’s view is equal- ly blunt: ‘Hardy wrote fast, worked hard and for much of the time he needed to be absorbed in his own private mental world [...] there were days when he hardly noticed her existence’.62 With the all-absorbing distractions of writing leading to an oversight rooted in literature, it is difficult to imagine how Hardy could be truly convinced that such an offence might be rectified by his pen, the former instrument of neglect. The hesitancy shrouding this suggestion of amends speaks also to Hardy’s evident sensibility that such an endeavour is always attempted in vain. Indeed, the hopelessness of atonement is a theme which has already been traced extensively through Hardy’s novels; most prominently, Peter J. Casagrande has characterised the prose as reflective of ‘the struggle—al- ways futile—to atone for error or mend defect’: ‘At the centre of each of these novels’, he argues, ‘is an image of the irremediable’.63 Though an argument Casagrande confines to Hardy’s ‘novelistic art’, the poetry exhibits much the same consciousness. The speaker of ‘The Church-Builder’ explicitly bemoans the ‘futile’ nature of atonement, as ‘powerful Wrong on feeble Right/Tramples in olden style’ (CP, pp. 171–72), while in ‘The Revisitation’, the pitifully posed ‘Did we meet again? – mend all?’, is answered with a resigned, and expected, ‘Alas’ (CP, p. 195). ‘The Flirt’s Tragedy’, meanwhile, presents a speaker striving somewhat familiarly to make amends to a woman he has wronged:
Still burning to make reparation Ipleadedtowiveher, And father her child, and thus faintly My mischief undo.
61 Jane Thomas, ‘In Defence of Emma Hardy’, The Hardy Society Journal, 9 (2013), pp. 39–59 (p. 43). See also Paul Turner, The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwells, 1998). 62 Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 239. 63 Peter J. Casagrande, Unity in Hardy’s Novels (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982), p. 2; p. 171. 20 EVA DEMA (CP, p. 212)
Yet the possibility of even a ‘faint’ reparation exists only within this fleet- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 ing four-line stanza: within the space of just a few lines, the poem is set back on course toward its promised tragedy of an undoable wrong. In looking beyond Emma, then, we find refractions of a long-held concern she perhaps comes to amplify, rather than establish, in her death. Elsewhere within Moments of Vision, even, we encounter Hardy reiterating this futility outside, and directly alongside, the Emma verses. In ‘He Revisits his First School’, Hardy recalls a lamentable return to a scene of his childhood:
But to show in the afternoon sun, With an aspect of hollow-eyed care, When none wished to see me come there, Was a garish thing, better undone. Yes; wrong was the way; But yet, let me say, I may right it – some day. (CP, p. 512)
A poem comprised of layers of revisiting, the physical act of return in which Hardy first errs is succeeded by the returns of revision. This closing stanza could be read as entertaining the possibility of amends, but it is difficult to ignore the contrasting definitiveness of ‘Yes; wrong was the way’, and the increasing vagueness of ‘I may right it—some day’. For Hardy had, in fact, first written the slightly more conclusive: ‘I may right it some day’, before injecting a doubtful hyphen during revision. An insertion which only height- ens the uncertainty already aroused by the conditional ‘may’, it builds an added layer of deferral into the line, the subsequently generated pause rein- forcing the sense of suspension of amends until an unknown, unspecified, and implicitly unlikely, future. Here, as elsewhere, revision appears to flaunt its own mutability in the face of wrongs ‘better’, yet impossibly, ‘undone’. Hardy’s subtle undermining of reparation in this poem helpfully gestures toward what I wish to suggest of the Emma verses: that is, that their amend- ments are ultimately those which complicate, rather than facilitate, the mak- ing of amends; that they offer covert acknowledgement of a futility which Hardy was evidently acutely conscious of. The close etymological ties of ‘amends’ and ‘amend’ – with the derivative ‘amendment’ being that which Hardy used most frequently to refer to his revisions (Letters, i, p. 21; ii, p. 29; iii, p. 336) – already gestures toward a sense in which reparation is often understood to be dependent upon alteration: a change in behaviour, or an undoing of wrongdoing. Indeed, these terms were even more closely tied in MOMENTS OF (RE)VISION 21 Hardy’s day, with the singular ‘amend’ often used interchangeably with ‘amends’, and Hardy testifies elsewhere to an understanding of a close correl- ation between these terms.64 In an early poem, ‘The Sleep Worker’, he ques- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 tions the possibility to ‘adjust, amend, and heal?’ (CP, p. 122), and it is unclear in which sense he uses the word ‘amend’; it feels almost janus-faced, glancing back toward adjust, and a definition of alteration, and ahead toward healing, and a meaning of reparation. Nestled between both terms, its ability to mean either solidifies a sense of interdependency between alteration and reparation of which Hardy was mindful. The fixity reinforced throughout these poems thus poses a pressing prob- lem. As Hardy’s revisions exercise a mutability denied to his division with Emma, a complex entanglement of terms arises, as amendments place his marriage ‘past amend’, and implicitly past amends. For while Casagrande’s ar- gument on the impossibility of reparation in Hardy’s prose hinges upon a ‘fundamental unity of form and content’, the poetry, I would argue, under- scores precisely the same understanding through a disjunction of the two.65 The capacity for amendment afforded by pen and ink might be said rather to exacerbate a consciousness that the themes on which Hardy wrote refused to be subject to the same sense of revision; ‘adjust’ and ‘amend’ may fall neatly, even synonymously, within the remits of revision, but ‘heal’ seems to lie just beyond its scope. As Emma’s voice warns steadily throughout, his attentive- ness arrives ‘too late’, and nowhere is this more painfully acknowledged than in ‘An Upbraiding’ – a poem revealed in the manuscript to undergo three purposeful, if slight, alterations. The first is a deduction from the title, which had at one point more optimistically read ‘A Gentle Upbraiding’; the second, an addition which delivers on Hardy’s evident resolution to be unrelenting in this act of self-scolding:
Now I am dead you come to me the In ^ moonlight, comfortless Ah, what would I have given alive To win such tenderness!
The amendment appears trifling, the mere addition of a determiner, but this late insertion alters an otherwise consistent rhythm, while doing little to refine the image. The second and fourth lines of each stanza are written in trimeter, without exception. That is, until revision. The late addition renders
64 See ‘amends’, OED Online,
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Eva Dema is a graduate student in English at the University of Cambridge. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efab006/6355306 by guest on 29 September 2021 Though greatly interested in the works of Dickens and other nineteenth- century novelists, her research centres primarily upon the poetry of Thomas Hardy.