Thomas Hardy Winter Words Poetry and Personal Writings POETRY Read by Bruce Alexander and Janet Maw NA237312D 1 The Oxen * 1:58 2 So begins The Life of Thomas Hardy r 1:18 3 A Church Romance # 2:15 4 The Self-Unseeing * 2:03 5 Neutral Tones * 1:18 6 When I Set Out For Lyonnesse * 3:47 7 Poems of Childhood and Home r 0:31 8 Domicilium * 2:36 9 During Wind And Rain # 1:26 10 The House Of Hospitalities * 0:49 11 Night In The Old Home * 1:15 12 Wessex Poems r 1:41 13 A Trampwoman’s Tragedy # 5:10 14 At The Railway Station * 1:23 15 One Ralph Blossom Soliloquizes * # 1:22 16 The Ruined Maid # 1:47 17 The Lost Pyx * 3:42 18 Great Things * 1:14 19 Weathers * 0:50 20 Snow In The Suburbs * 1:20 2 21 The Fallow Deer At The Lonely House # 0:59 22 Poems Past And Present r 1:58 23 In Tenebris I (From Psalm 102) * 1:10 24 In Tenebris II (From Psalm 142) * 1:55 25 Wessex Heights * 2:49 26 At Day-Close In November * 0:36 27 Shut Out That Moon # 1:14 28 The Five Students * 1:58 29 A Commonplace Day * 2:11 30 I Look Into My Glass * 0:40 31 Nobody Comes * 0:51 32 Exeunt Omnes * 1:03 33 Satires Of Circumstance r 0:52 34 The Workbox * 1:32 35 ‘Ah, Are You Digging On My Grave?’ # 1:56 36 In Church * 0:47 37 In The Cemetery * 0:42 38 At Tea # 0:44 39 At A Watering Place * 0:46 40 The Curate’s Kindness * 1:52 3 41 The Rash Bride * 5:45 42 Poems of Love And Loss r 2:15 43 A Countenance * 0:58 44 The Contretemps * 3:00 45 Plena Timoris * 1:14 46 Molly Gone * 1:37 47 A Broken Appointment * 0:54 48 The Division * 0:35 49 The Photograph * 1:54 50 Thoughts Of Phena At News Of Her Death * 1:26 51 Her Death And After * 6:56 52 Her Immortality * # 2:25 53 A Night In November * 0:37 54 He Prefers Her Earthly * 1:01 55 Poems of 1912–1913 r 4:42 56 Under The Waterfall * # 2:45 57 The Going * 3:10 58 The Frozen Greenhouse: St Juliot * 0:52 59 I Found Her Out There * 1:12 60 The Haunter # 1:29 4 61 The Voice * 0:59 62 His Visitor # 1:22 63 After A Journey * 2:02 64 Beeny Cliff: March 1870 – March 1913 * 1:21 65 At Castle Boterel * 2:13 66 Poems of Faith And Doubt r 1:53 67 Before Life And After * 0:59 68 In The British Museum * # 1:05 69 In The Servants’ Quarters * 2:32 70 Epitaph on a Pessimist * 0:18 71 The Darkling Thrush: 31st December 1900 * 1:33 72 The Convergence Of The Twain: Lines On The Loss Of The Titanic * 2:01 73 Men Who March Away * 1:25 74 Channel Firing: April 1914 * 1:52 75 A Christmas Ghost Story: Christmas Eve, 1899 # 0:55 76 Drummer Hodge * 1:31 77 In Time Of ‘The Breaking Of Nations’: 1915 * 0:39 78 Afterwards * 2:23 Total time: 2:16:50 Bruce Alexander * Janet Maw # Neville Jason r 5 Thomas Hardy Winter Words Thomas Hardy, born in 1840, died in worth, and it is obvious that he carried 1928, does not fit comfortably into the this into his verse, perhaps in part categories of English literature. For a unconsciously, the Gothic art-principle start, he was (most unusually) both in which he had been trained – the novelist and poet, both experimentalist principle of spontaneity, found in and traditionalist, in form as much as in mouldings, tracery and such-like – content. He was a poet from his youth, resulting in the ‘unforeseen’ character a novelist in middle age, and a poet of his metres and stanzas, that of stress again until his death. rather than of syllable…’ (Life of The ideas about poetry which he Thomas Hardy). And he defended articulated in diaries, notes and himself against the charge of prefaces were simple and direct – pessimism: ‘that these impressions ‘poetry is emotion put into measure’; have been condemned as “pessimistic” or, ‘the mission of poetry is to record – as if that were a very wicked adjective impressions, not convictions’. Some – shows a curious muddle-mindedness. critics and readers of his own day It must be obvious that there is a higher commented adversely on his characteristic of philosophy than technique, not understanding what he pessimism, or than meliorism – which is was trying to do, and on his ideas, truth…’ (General Preface, 1912). wrongly considering him a pessimist. Yet it remains the case that the He tried to explain the technique: ‘As dominant note of Hardy’s poetry is an to rhythm’. Years earlier he had acute sense of loss – loss of faith, loss decided that too regular a beat was of love. For Hardy, time and human bad art…He knew that in architecture insensitivity combine to destroy the cunning irregularity is of enormous person and his personality: if, as Larkin 6 says, the essential instinct of art is to misconception of what makes great ‘preserve’, then this is certainly true of poetry – John Crowe Ransom, for Hardy. The poem itself is an act of example, in claiming that Hardy was ‘a defiant preservation, asserting the great minor poet…and a poor major value of the human spirit in spite of all poet’ clumsily mistakes the personal, that time and its agents can do: idiosyncratic, small-scale voice of Hardy Ah, no; the years, the years; for ‘minor’ work, failing to realise that Down their carved names the rain- greatness has to do with expression, drop ploughs. feeling and insight, not ‘big’ ideas, The ‘names’ represent individuals – clever literary allusions and self- feelings, people – while the impersonal conscious importance. rain-drop, agent of what Housman When the work of T.S. Eliot (and Ezra calls ‘heartless, witless nature’, Pound) has dulled into datedness, embodies all that opposes the precious, Hardy’s will survive, and be loved. albeit transient, in human life. Perhaps we should leave the last word It was only after Hardy’s death that to F.R. Leavis, not normally known as the literary world began to realise what an admirer of Hardy: ‘the single- it had lost. W.H. Auden commented minded integrity of his preoccupation favourably on Hardy’s ‘hawk’s vision, with a real world and a real past, the his way of looking at life from a very intentness of his focus upon particular great height’; Ezra Pound said that facts and situations, gives this poetry nobody had taught him anything about the solidest kind of emotional writing after Thomas Hardy died; and substance. There is no emotionality. Philip Larkin declared that Hardy’s The emotion seems to inhere in the Collected Poems were ‘many times reality recognized and grasped.’ over the best body of poetic work this century has so far to show’. Notes by Perry Keenlyside Adverse critical comment has resulted from a common modernist 7 Notes on the Poems The Oxen Hardy movingly and simply he later called ‘Egdon Heath’, the wild expresses his nostalgia for the religious setting for his novel ‘The Return of the faith he has lost, imagining the Native’. ‘Esculents’ are vegetables. Christmas story as it might be During Wind and Rain This experienced today. remarkable poem mimics in its sound A Church Romance The poet and movement a cry of despair at touchingly evokes the first meeting of time’s ruthless destruction of precious his parents-to-be. ‘New Sabbath’ and people and places. ‘Mount Ephraim’ are old psalm-tunes. The House of Hospitalities The poet The Self-Unseeing The dreamy is haunted by memories of childhood atmosphere suggests a lack of Christmases. awareness in the characters that their Night in the Old Home Ancestral innocent world will disappear forever. ghosts counsel resignation and Neutral Tones Stark language and unreflecting tranquillity. imagery evoke a feeling of despair: the A Trampwoman’s Tragedy Hardy lovers have arrived at a moment of thought this old-style ballad his most bleak truth. successful poem: certainly the story- When I Set Out for Lyonnesse telling is brilliantly strong and ‘Lyonnesse’ is an old word for economical. Cornwall. Hardy thought, along with At the Railway Station, Upway A an American admirer, that this was little boy innocently offers to comfort a perhaps his ‘sweetest lyric’. convict by playing his violin for him. Domicilium The title simply means One Ralph Blossom Soliloquizes An ‘home’. This is the earliest of Hardy’s example of sly humour in Hardy – he is surviving poems, written between amused by the idea of an old 1857 and 1860. He tells us how his womaniser escaping punishment home was poised on the edge of what through mortal illness. 8 The Ruined Maid Hardy draws a way in which he feels excluded poignant and humorous contrast because he will not express facile between the Dorset peasant girl and optimism. her old friend who has become a Wessex Heights Again Hardy spins a successful prostitute in London. long line in this poem which powerfully The Lost Pyx A priest miraculously evokes the poet’s absolute isolation – recovers ‘the Body of Christ Himself’ he is an outcast, feeling more like a and is thus able to give communion to ghost than an alive member of society.