The Hardy Hennets
The poems are in the order as they appear in the Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 4th edition, 1952.
From manuscripts of moving song
Inspired by scenes and dreams unknown
I'll pour out raptures that belong
To others as there were mine own.Thomas Hardy, 'Let me enjoy', stanza iii.
1. 'HAP'
Hardy often bewails that Nature is blind.
Wants Her to see what's done, would have it some god
let Her know (Hardy seems to be sure She's kind
deep in Her heart). But She's thwarted by 'Doomsters'
just as blind, who are given to unmeant, odd,
blank and haphazard freaks, who are ministers
of mere chance, with no thought of what might transpire
lucky or unlucky, sinister, sunny.
He would rather that They had the fixed desire,
infinite, gleeful, to thwart him, their study
in the cosmos no other than to frustrate
all his hopes. Then a Mind would lie behind Fate.
(p. 7)
2. 'NEUTRAL TONES'
In the mind you project a cinema screen.
Black-and-white film, turning Sixties to Thirties
(it's two centuries' Sixties). With montage the scene
plays out in flashbacks that burn. 'Ash' is both the tree
and the deadness of old fire. There come rushes
replayed from memory, too prompt to stop. See
in the spelling of 'gray' a grayer absence.
Even the Bird's lost its Romantic freedom
to the Gothic — a horror-film! In silence,
though — it's no talkie. The auditorium
has but one of its seats filled. He's not allowed
to hear voices — it's himself who's far too cowed.
(p. 9)
3. 'HER INITIALS'
How one savours the irony! For has one
not felt the same on the two occasions? May
have been music, not verse. One knows one has done
well to forget. Pleasant to be reassured
with such wit that 'the radiance has waned away'.
Good! — a reminder that one is not lured
anymore; there's no danger of treachery,
heartache, suspicion, or shame. There is no sweat
on my brow, no indictments of lechery,
whispering echoes from an oubliette —
save, as, helpless, surprised, in night's confine,
by a dream, unhoped, of their lips on mine.
(p. 10)
4. 'THE DANCE AT THE PHOENIX'
As one's drawn in the story of Jenny, there
stirs underneath, out of sight, yet upholding
and impelling the whole, exacting a share
round in the dancing, without sign of its source,
as if dancing were joy in itself, folding
all of emotion's release, all its high force
in the spring of the foot in both line and bar,
never betraying its key to the symbol
or its pulse to the law, taking heart's hurrah
right through the rhythm with eager and nimble
leaping over restraint, body's transgression.
You can take this as Hardy's own confession.
(pp. 38-42)
5. 'FRIENDS BEYOND'
What a shock to the pious! That the loved ones
really are dead and not peering from the bar
of a heaven above! Not that each one shuns
what is concerning us here — they are beyond
any shunning or heeding. For Hardy, are
free from all care; none can be fearful or fond,
unresentful or outraged, grieving or glad.
But, where the pious accuse him of despair,
observe, all you've to do is render as sad
how poor humanity's made human with care,
whether seeking a joy or flying from fear —
so we've learned from the dead to bear with each year.
(pp. 52-4)
6. 'NATURE'S QUESTIONING'
He is one of the 'chastened children', and their
master's the Real, but, like many pupils, he's
clearly not comprehended the text, unaware
how his own questions are relevant. For, yes,
all the rules are at hazard, but there's no tease
meant by a gleeful mind. If rules are a mess,
no automaton works by necessity.
He may think God has gone, but one asks 'Which god?'
And that hint of a plan, no high deity,
peering below, is ready to give the nod
if we're going along with it, yet one can
make ourselves, if we choose to, a godlike plan.
(pp. 58-9)
7. I LOOK INTO MY GLASS'
It's got under my 'wasting skin'. Yes, Plato
easily speaks of the 'passions relaxing
their hold' — not my experience! Much may go —
eyesight and hearing, your short-term memory;
there's no leaping a stair without you taxing
breath and heart both, and where is that energy
of a morning you boasted of? No sitting
long but you're stiff at the knees. Good exercise,
of course, healthy your diet — all that's fitting
Yeats' 'tattered coat on a stick'. There's no disguise,
though, as Hardy complains. One enters the play
of the eyes — at once she is looking away.
(p. 72)
8. 'A COMMONPLACE DAY'
How to colour the colourless. A gothic
ghost in the first line is uncannily drawn
as an insect a-scuttle, in satiric
bitterness, vanishing under the blank past.
And a fire must go out, and a child dead-born
show for a moment; rain from overcast
sky slide down the pane as his thoughts sink low.
This is despair, you would think, Hardy again
giving way to his self-pitying woe.
Down comes the tombstone lid to cap it all — when
at the last, his regret, as glimpsed in the trope
of 'awake', does awaken the hint of hope.
(pp. 104-5)
9. 'TO LIFE'
Was Pascal who suggested the best way to
find a belief in God was to lay aside
all one's doubts and perform, as if they were true,
all of the rituals, sacraments, kneelings,
prayings, blessings with holy water, to guide
one to the Faith. By ignoring one's feelings
you were betting that death did hide His presence.
Thus you'd be safe from hellfire. Nothing was lost
if the end was a blank: you'd escape vengeance
if He was there. It was a minimum cost.
What if, though, one's performance was not so odd
since imagining Him was all that was God?
(pp. 107-8)
10. 'THE SUBALTERNS'
Where in 'Hap' he bewailed the absence of mind
ruling the universe, here he is thankful
for it. Darkness and cold, disease, come as blind
enemies, not even enemies, but chance
collocations of matter, a mere babble,
waves that could break here or there, no demon's dance
that is weaving round you as the pivotal
point, but a brute swirl of purposeless atoms
unaware of awareness, their orbital
vortices spinning into vain phantasms
life and death. But denying them all knowledge
takes all hate and self-pity out of courage.
(p. 110)
11. 'GOD-FORGOTTEN'
There's such fun in this sketch. Sanctimonious
voices cry 'Blasphemy!' To present the One
on whose fatherly love we all in anxious
fear must rely as one who has forgotten
us, and, worse, that the Earth has a million
million rivals for divine attention
here exposes to sacrilegious rending
all that is sacred. But other voices say,
to suggest he condemns for 'not mending',
and to imply he'd restore us anyway
is naïve. Or say, when 'trouble hovers nigh',
we've a need to imagine One above the sky.
(pp. 112-13)
12. 'TO AN UNBORN PAUPER CHILD'
'It exacts a full look at the worst' — motto
Hardy adheres to in verse as well as in life.
He won't let you forget tragedy's shadow,
destiny's would-be dictatorship. In these
panoramas apocalyptic of strife,
hate, and destruction, all joys vanish, hopes freeze,
solidarities crumble. Like those last-day
visions of Martin, the universal prospect
shows creation's catastrophe. His dismay
leads him to wish the child never to elect
to be born, to abort itself. At this worst,
though, he winces. We find that despair's reversed.
(pp. 116-17)
13. 'THE DARKLING THRUSH'
Hear the paradigm. Threnody, century,
landscape, observer, birdsong, each reflecting
in a fusion of facets each, imagery
imaging real and itself. First, sinister
winter, ominous twilight, both expecting
night at the century's end, the vista
its dead body outlaid in a vault, the wind
choiring its dirge, all lyrical voices dumb.
In the single observer all life has thinned
down to despondent gloom. Hear the thrush become
him while he spurns its hope, as note by each note
gives denial within the poem he wrote.
(p. 137)
14. 'MAD JUDY'
Yes, he's using his irony to cut through
where a performance of hope fails to be one —
a performance, that is, for it isn't true
to a ritual if you take it for real.
Where's the risk if you let all the social fun
hide it? Yes, dance till dawn is red, till you feel
life was meant to be joyful, but it isn't
really a joy unless you're remembering
night around you. The whole point of merriment
lies in the danger it skirts, the suffering
it keeps always in sight. 'Mad' she still must stay
because Judy went too far the other way.
(p. 138)
15. 'IN TENEBRIS, I'
A dead voice. There's no faith without fear, no heart
facing no risk. This retirer from others
wants a friend who never sets himself apart,
does what's expected; wants a body beyond
decay, having decayed. Cowardice smothers
fear with superior blandness, with a fond,
blank withdrawal from life. Why is it shrinking
thus? Could say it was a wilting flower and
a bird fainting in dread and a leaf freezing
to the dun of the earth. Those who can't stand
all the 'smart' that a love indeed must impart
have, just as he describes, a soul with no heart.
(p. 153)
16. 'IN TENEBRIS, II'
He's made sarcasm jaunty to match the smug
cheeriness optimists force on their hearers.
See him mimic the impatient way they shrug
off any challenges, stiffly ignorant
of the charges he's making — mere chimeras
hatched from a wearisome mind. Exuberant
in their noise and their power, they see and hear
only their own perceivings, feel only their own
sincere feelings, most sure that nothing they fear
ever could happen, and there's no fear not known
to them now. It is plain to all who are wise
it is best from some sights to avert one's eyes.
(p. 154)
17. 'THE TRAMPWOMAN'S TRAGEDY'
Could ask Hardy the question why he should view
this as 'the most successful' of all his verse.
The technique is, yes, flawless. Nothing askew,
rhythm or image, characterization.
But we need not, for he regards nothing worse
than an ironic false transformation
on which loving and living may slip awry.
Hers was a joke as proof of her power
to enforce out of fate the sexual tie
binding her man. It was she who brought the hour,
not some game played by fate. With nought more than breath
she reverses the card turning love to death.
(pp. 182-5)
18. 'THE CURATE'S KINDNESS
A WORKHOUSE IRONY
One can wonder how Emma took this. A neat
irony, reversing the curate's well-meant
good intentions. His pity enacts a cheat
fate has devised, exposing him to satire —
indeed, all such do-gooders. That the man's bent,
right at the story's end, of courting hellfire
with his suicide rather than settle down
there with his wife to share their last days must seem
sacrilegious to spouses, must draw a frown
hiding the twinges of shame. Out of the dream
of society, not all bodies can feel
what the rule stipulates should be in the Real.
(p. 194)
19. 'SHUT OUT THAT MOON'
No, it doesn't add up. Let us take as true
that it was 'too fragrant', promising ideal,
paradisal embrace, that you cannot view
stars' real enchantment as romantic magic,
take the scent of the blossom as what you feel,
leave as unquestioned if there might be tragic —
comic — outcomes quite unforeseen when lovers
eagerly overlay each other with dream,
that a lute may be played so that it discovers,
later in life, a beauty that does not seem
at all fugitive — why, then, does he so teach
us to 'prison our eyes', speak 'mechanic speech'?
(p. 201)
20. 'THE CONFORMERS'
Inconsistent again. At the end we look
down on 'sound parish views', on the commonplace
stale morality, prudence that will not brook
passion's undutiful escapade, the tryst
all the sweeter for secrecy, the disgrace
gossip can relish. The couple who have kissed
as a pledge of high ecstasy, poetic,
unique election, must accept a decline
to prosaic normality, bathetic,
sober sedateness. But how are we, in fine,
to assess such discretion and such passion?
Hardy leaves us to choose from either fashion.
(pp. 213-14)
21. 'LET ME ENJOY'
D'you believe him? Could copy him in this fine
sacrifice? 'Heaven is what I cannot reach' —
thus wrote Emily Dickinson, and the line
doesn't presume that there is one; for hope
can be held to where nothing's there to slake each
personal thirst. Enough that there remains scope
for enchanting the world without fantasy
nectar. Let our ancestors be the 'blest'
as we play, open-eyed, that their ecstasy
shines from eternity, their 'heavenly rest'
a mere blank that we never believe, a song
only there as we sing it, all our lives long.
(p. 222)
22. 'NIGHT IN THE OLD HOME'
When I read such a poem, my ancestors
beam at me too, grandparents for grandparents,
and my parents for his. Both, as successors,
see as alike the friendly, wise and wistful
faces full of concern, all-knowing ancients
somehow foreseeing all our anxious, wishful
doings, in hope to guide and protect. And tears
come to my eyes, and the child's past love
reaches out and remembers over the years
all their affection and fun. Nowhere above
us, however, or then, were they gods. Won't mend
to believe so. Nothing wrong, though, so to pretend.
(p. 253)
23. 'AFTER THE LAST BREATH'
No concern has the dead body. Those who shared
what of the last fears and desires it retained
before came that last moment, who vainly cared
knowing the hopelessness, now feel together
with it absence of purpose, feel themselves drained,
aimless, in blank release, cannot tell whether
she or they it is died. On the medicine
bottles the words fail to be read, as bare
of all meaning as dust, cannot determine
choice, for choice is dependent upon care,
and all care upon life. But these words survive,
for his poem's a witness to love alive.
(pp. 253-4)
24. 'THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN'
Steel as strict as the rule. Hear the rages and shouts
fire casts about, the wrestling and flailing
of the steam-oppressed water, the shifted gouts
prisoned in pistons' repetitive syntax.
All reflection's exactitude now failing.
smeared by the worm. Even the poetic lacks
every glittering, rhythmical image. Fish
no one expects to read any evidence
of disaster. This structure of human wish
suffers the might of the heaviest sentence.
It's a danger to match, since always absurd,
the Symbolic to Real, the World to the Word.
(pp. 288-9)
25. 'GOD'S FUNERAL'
And we join him in going along with that
train of the slowly stepping mourners, sad to
hear still some of them protesting loudly at
those 'weak of faith' who call this a 'funeral',
say it's we who should die! Sad to see a few
turning aside in despair, and several
seeking death by their own hand. Such defeat
both for idolators and unbelievers!
For that light that he sees! It's not a deceit,
priestly or self — You can't call those deceivers
who can image a god knowing Him image,
who can stamp out the coin knowing the mintage.
(p. 307)
26. 'UNDER THE WATERFALL'
Down this valley erosion has gouged its path,
shovelling, shuffling, and turning resistance
to assistance, tree branches to roots, a hearth
into a graveyard of tumbled brick, plaster,
books like dead fungi — obstinate existence,
all our familiar means in disaster
crushed to chaos. But down there deposition
smoothes its curves, sifts the soil with sand in quaint whorls
and weird arabesques. No recognition
there in some glints of glass of a waterfall's
lodgement more than a century past — a wine
glass no longer 'intact', no longer a shrine.
(pp. 315-17; the above was written after the Boscastle flood, August 16th, 2004)
[For Hardy's unsatisfactory lines, 'The purl of a runlet that never ceases/In stir of kingdoms, in wars, in peaces', read in preference 'The purl of a runlet that knows no pause/In stir of kingdoms, in peace, in wars']
27. 'THE GOING'
All his life he'd been haunted by death. He'd draw
churches in section showing the vaults beneath.
And then how many times obsessional awe
tempts him when writing to bring graveyards into
some significant scene: up on Egdon Heath
beauty is found on a burial mound; true
love was Marty's —her tending the grave of Giles
closes the story; Troy places flowers
for his Fanny in vain. In these gothic aisles
Hardy went loitering, possessed for hours
like a ghost himself. Death decides to mock
his disciple, arranged an unforeseen shock.
(pp. 318-19)
28. 'RAIN ON A GRAVE'
In his song-cycle Kindertotenlieder
Mahler presents a father in wind and rain
who's recalling the times when he would fear a
storm would endanger his children, make them ill,
make them die. But no weather can again
threaten their safety, no insidious chill
grip their delicate frames, for they are secure
now in the perfect protection of a hand
beyond his. So, too, here. Both songs make us sure
father and husband pity those must withstand
what the world can inflict. As in 'Friends Beyond',
we learn what it is of someone to be fond.
(p. 321)
29. 'BEENY CLIFF'
Take this world as 'a dull misfeatured stain' or
'prinked' by the 'purples' of the sea in sunlight,
or perhaps both, weird with threat, wild with desire, more
chasmal than beautiful, the reverse, or both.
And this persona acted by Hardy, might
he not be rightly accused of being loth
long before she had died of not exploring
love as it is, not as sentimentally
prinked by nostalgia, misfeatured by soaring
waves of indifference. But one can gently
forgive him, entranced far away in the west.
All living 'exacts a full look at the' best.
(p. 330)
30. 'AT CASTLE BOTEREL'
As to primaeval rocks, geologists can
read off the evidence, aeons of change quite
imperceptible then. But the signs they scan,
layers and fossils and faults, are not to be
read as words that Time left there for human sight,
patiently written and kept. Not apathy
or indifference the cause of this lapse — there's no
mind there to feel any such indifference.
So the ink of his poem's just as blank; so,
too, the sound of the words has a blank silence
in its waves. Yet to quartzite, granite and schist
it is love gave a life that doesn't exist.
(pp. 330-1)
31. 'THE ABBEY MASON'
And we know how we're meant to take this. What an
error the mason made, so humbly to take
what the abbot insisted as truth: God's plan
working mysteriously in frost and sun —
for in all of creation His touch can make
miracle when least expected. Anyone
who is properly pious has to admit
His is the hint, and that we borrow from Him
all our insights, the mason but His secret
servant! How wrong, then! — Ah, but wait —
Not without peers and forebears did he create.
(pp. 379-86)
32. 'THE OXEN'
Very easy to hoodwink hope, for all you
need is a willing, aspiring gathering
where a story is told as patently true,
drawing both elders and juniors closer
in a comforting flock, joined in flattering
all of them, pictured meek and mild, with master
as a child yet a knower of all that might
stand in the way of their happiness. If they
took it just as a narrative to unite
all in their love of the other, of the stray
beast that will not be tamed . . . What is submission
if it kneels but to sink in superstition?
(p. 439)
33. 'GREAT THINGS'
To be sung, to be danced to. It asks for a
melody. Each of the scenes flash as intense
as a memory music brings, its aura
fleeting, aurora-ephemeral, piercing
and gone. Simple the words, apparent the sense,
bold the beat, no too-fine trope interfering
with the tune as it goes. His joys in drinking,
dancing, and loving are swirled all together
in ecstatic recall that fuses thinking,
feeling, and welcoming their going, whether
soon or late. Gives a hope at the last we'll thus
find some sense in 'the One that has need of us.'
(p. 445-6)
34. 'THE WIND'S PROPHECY'
Thor raised Mjollnir, his hammer, and brought it down
hard on the head of Skrymir, the great giant,
who awoke, looked about, and asked with a frown,
'Was that a leaf brushing my brow?' And Hardy,
as a lover entranced, shouts his defiant,
absolute love, knowing nought of what darkly
is enwrapped in the gusts of the storm of time,
threatening wreck, hiding what feeble light
man holds up for himself, driving waves to climb
crashing in panic on rocks, where the one bright
star is drowned in the cloud. The second and third
and fourth love are what fate demands — and absurd.
(pp. 464-5)
[For the 'second and third and fourth love', see also the novel The Well-Beloved, and the poems 'The Well-Beloved' pp. 121-23, and 'The Chosen', pp. 640-1.]
35. 'DURING WIND AND RAIN'
Are they lost like the leaves? Are songs now silence
far in some nowhere direction forever?
When the candles went out, did the light's absence
mean it shone elsewhere on the same happy
faces? Do those birds promising storm dissever
scenes of that gardening group from uncanny
replays years later when the rose that was trained
strains to the gale till it cracks? The alfresco
breakfast in morning sun, is its picture stained
there in the past, do the laughs still echo
out of hearing? The words carved on a gravestone,
do they keep a sharp edge, never overgrown?
(pp. 465-6)
[See also 'The Absolute Explains'. pp. 716-19, for Hardy's reflections on the philosopher John McTaggart's 'B-series' view of time, i.e. as permanently existing in its 'earlier-later' relationship.]
36. 'MIDNIGHT ON THE GREAT WESTERN'
But a ticket can tell you where you're getting
off. He's been given a ticket by someone,
perhaps told just how definite past betting
stations like that really are, destination
where a marvellous time when the journey's done
waits for the traveller. And cancellation
is impossible. Locks for that key may not
prove so easy to find. No wonder he's listless,
hardly sharing the trust of those who know what
is the right thing to do. Within this dimness,
it's no wonder romantics should see a child
as a visitant, alien, undefiled.
(p. 483)
37. 'THE SHADOW ON THE STONE'
One can ignore a clue, many clues, a proof,
given sufficient will. A self-deception
that is no such thing. Bent on holding aloof,
firm and unswerving as a tight-rope walker
never looking below, no glimpse to threaten
dream against real, he enforces an order
that itself is its own disproof. A falling
leaf proves his grief, and there was no answer to
a vain question he knew was vain. Such stalling
full in the face of common sense, when he knew
what he knew, though, just didn't 'keep down' his grief:
it remains a denial of that belief.
(p. 498)
38. 'IN THE TIME OF "THE BREAKING OF NATIONS' 1
You use 'only' to mean of no interest,
relevance, can be neglected. An old man
who is harrowing clods leaves us unimpressed
when we have war on our minds — and his stumbling
horse. Better noting battlesmoke than
that from a heap of couch-grass. Hardy's humbling
what the 'dynasties', 'emperies' claim; and love,
here in 'the maid and her wight', see, will outlast
war's imperious awe. But love's not above
conflict. It gains its temper in the harsh blast
of explosions, in blood and not paradise,
as it strives to solve hatred with sacrifice.
(p. 511)
1 Jeremiah, li, 20.
39. 'AFTERWARDS'
It's a question of notice. He reminds
me now in May again to look up and see
through my window the leaves that the birch unbinds,
emerald pendants a-sway; and the pigeons
as they profit by all shifts in the carefree
air; and the bright-eyed hedgehog in the garden's
midnight stillness, that retreats trustingly slow;
stars in the black-out, as keen as the frost, as far
as the farthest, their grandeur of years ago
held for an endless moment — and that pulsar
of a bell! Now I notice, ready to grant
that a poem like this knows how to enchant.
(p. 521)
40. 'WEATHERS'
E. L. Wright wrote to Hardy on May twenty-
sixth in the year '22, therein saying
that he'd made up a tune to it.2 That's plenty,
this way or that, of years before I was born!
Yet I did sing a tune to it, while playing
once on our German piano — in the dawn
of the Sixties it must have been. My daughter
sometimes is heard with it on her lips. I may
from those galloping anapaests have caught a
jollying lilt, and yearned for a holiday
in 'the south and west'. May, too, have once again,
in the minor, recalled it in wind and rain.
(p. 533)
2 Letter in the Dorset County Museum.
41. 'ACCORDING TO THE MIGHTY WORKING' 3
One can look, as I do now, at the stillest
stone — it's some polished semi-gem with rainbow
flakes and silvered scales locked in its chillest
liquid transparency, like brown burn-water
touched to timeless inertia. In its depths show
mazy geometries set in some mortar
of coarse crystal to rigid labyrinthine
certainties no one can trace. But the pebble,
lying smooth and remote as adamantine
sculpted eternity, conceals a rebel
microcosmos. It masquerades its dead calm
with electron and quark, all fear to disarm.
(p. 541)
3 Ephesians, i: 19
42. 'GOING AND STAYING'
The effacement of human wish. Points in time
worked for and hoped for, the objects of longing,
from the sunshine to kisses, a joyous rhyme
lauding them both to the music that echoes
it, their hours we would keep as years, all thronging
happy in chime, with no rain without rainbows.
And the holocausts, plagues, bombings, hatreds,
firestorms, tsunamis — it is all human fear
that we strive to efface. That Time grasps backwards
both the sublime and the sinister with year
upon year can afford us no cure for strife.
To complain of the game is to opt from life.
(p. 543)
43. THE SELFSAME SONG'
Born for death, this immortal bird. No gaunt thrush
either, that knew of a hope Hardy did not.
No Wordsworthian linnet whose song will gush
forth in exultant strain, spirit presiding
over May; nor a Shelleyan skylark, dot
vanishing into the air, as if hiding
self in song and song in bliss; nor Meredith's, turned
star in the highest heaven. Nor for Darley,
praising phoenix in Araby, never burned
but to be born, made a goddess like Kali
who destroys to revive out of holy flame.
Even Hardy touched hope, for the song's the same.
(p. 566)
[See Wordsworth's 'The Green Linnet', Shelley's 'To a Skylark', Meredith's 'The Lark Ascending', and Darley's 'Nepenthe', Canto I.]
44. 'LAST WORDS TO A DUMB FRIEND'
He was a focus of love for all of us, this
cat of nigh nineteen years. Would bound to attack
with excess of pretence of stern emphasis
Lupa, the plaster cast from Rome we had placed
in the garden. Would dance in a maniac
sideways chasse with his back raised in barefaced
show of frightening size, with bottle-brush tail
held like a battle-standard. Would never scratch
with intent. He would follow us without fail
close as a dog, so it seemed we must match
him in choice of our path. Like Hardy's, it's true,
when we come to the end, that's what we must do.
(pp. 621-2)
45. 'BEST TIMES'
Thus Wordsworth: 'The eye it cannot choose but
see.'4 It's a blind, automatic thing, vision.
Colours, space — and that's it. To all knowing shut.
Nothing is labelled, identified, neatly,
safely packaged for use, with no misprision
possible. How fortunate if we could featly
read off all that a scene could mean, could perceive
every suggestion there in the evidence
long before any woe might befall, believe
clues to fruition and joy with confidence.
But we only guess promise and threat. Whether
weal or woe, we must bet on both together.
(p. 646)
4 'Expostulation and Reply', l. 17.
46. 'AN ANCIENT TO ANCIENTS'
Not in tune with these days is that refrain
'Gentlemen'. Where are the ladies? — if you
except those in the boat, veiled as in some vain
feigning of allurement (but that in
part the poem acknowledges as one view
nigh superseded). What has gone to ruin,
as he lists them, are not 'out of date' but so
much in the past that we pick and choose without
an oedipal prejudice, say we owe
Tennyson more than our fathers did, leave out
Lytton. Still, getting older, one can't ignore
his regret — nor his counsel to do much more.
(p. 658)
47. 'WAITING BOTH'
In the stars there is fate, some say. What 'degree',
though, could exist by which star and man were both
to be measured? And what easy guarantee
is there that stars could 'mean' anything?
And the 'I' who looks up, why is he so loth,
given his place in the scheme, to beginning
the strange pain of his 'changing' long before death?
Stoic detachment is fine as long as one
is engaged in the world. One doesn't draw breath
only to wait till one can't. When all is done,
there's no change after death, except for the mode
other people interpret what you've bestowed.
(p. 665)
48. 'THE GRAVEYARD OF DEAD CREEDS'
It is strange that I, philosopher, should write
here in a poem a response to Hardy's
most untypical prophecy, much too bright
one would expect from an old, inveterate,
vatic pessimist. Time offers tsunamis,
terrorist violence, indiscriminate
murder, torture from tyrants, so we have still
good enough reasons for 'groan'. Can I claim to be
now 'a sentient seer'? Have I had the skill,
insight and purpose to restore the guarantee
of a god where no god exists? Who knows? Yet
there is hope in the leap of love beyond threat.
(p. 687)
49. 'SNOW IN THE SUBURBS'
Soft oppression, effacement, all boundaries
merged in the wholeness of white. All directions
rendered vague and evasive, all contraries
smoothed, oppositions soothed, all voices silenced
since no difference lingers, all corrections
emptied of purpose, all wanderings licensed
since all passion is satisfied, persuasion
pointless. So much insidious concealment
with its delicate touch, its suffocation
never once felt, near inurns one in vacant
dissolution. We all, saved from the cold tomb,
are cats taken into the warmth of the womb.
(pp. 694-5)
50. 'A LIGHT SNOWFALL AFTER FROST'
There are changes in Time that you see — there's a man
passing, another — we know the difference.
They are not going to change as we look. Our span
judging such changes is fixed: a bird flying
past we trace with the eye, but no persistence
wins from the frost a move. There's no descrying
of the oak in its growth, the rock in its wear
smoothed by the water like sculpting of snowdrifts
or the thawing of snow. You can stand and stare
all that you want, but you will not catch the shifts
in the shade of your hair, the shrink of your spine,
the lines on your face. Time yields up the sign.
(p. 695)
51. 'NOBODY COMES'
The Aeolian lyre of the twentieth
century: telegraph wires. John Davidson
heard them 'shrill' down in Sussex, but not death
made up his theme, but enchantment of all that
was before him one sunset. The illusion
Hardy prefers in the night as he stands at
his gate, lonely, depressed, is of a 'spectral
lyre' that 'a spectral hand' sweeps. Strange that one
who had written of pastoral communal
joys at a time when a 'quire' was of homespun
'viol' players, in solitude hears the blare
of a passing car leaving 'a blacker air'.
(pp. 704-5)
52. 'PROUD SONGSTERS'
In a new television documentary
centred on life's evolution, species were
shown as bright points that burned on from their ancestry,
splitting in branches like fireworks, with the dead
as the journeys behind them. Didn't occur —
not a surprise — to the producers instead
to show where all the animals had gathered
being and life — the water, the plants, other
creatures serving as sustenance. It mattered
deeply to Hardy. Those ecstatic songs cover
up the secret of Time. Whatever life's worth,
one can still put the question 'Where before birth?'
(pp. 797-8)
53. 'AN UNKINDLY MAY'
Here are two kinds of stoicism. Hardy
can't help complaining even though he never
placed a sure hope on hurrying a tardy
spring, for he matches too promptly a dark trope
to what Nature presents. For see — whatever
choice he comes up with is a proof he can't cope
with his own active fantasy: there's sourness,
dirt, and the creaks of age; rust, and dishevelled
hair, and pinching, and quailing. Longs for cloudless
skies and the song of birds. All's bedevilled
for this impatient poet. But the shepherd,
with a task to perform, sees nothing wayward.
(p. 803)
54. 'CHRISTMASTIDE'
See the tramp as the darkling thrush. In this case
sodden not gaunt, but, like the bird, he can sing,
like a poet, can sing — for poets displace
voices inside their poems. The gloomy 'me'
makes it plain with the weather, for it's raining
but it's 'splintering' too; all he can see,
for it's twilight, is 'bleared', and the bushes 'sigh',
blown by the wind. So, like the mourner who leant
on the coppice gate, like that wanderer high
up on a moor5 who, joyless, met with one sent
'from some far region', he's one who's needing
'apt admonishment' from a Christmas greeting.
(p. 807)
5 The Leech-Gatherer in 'Resolution and Independence', by William Wordsworth.
55. 'I WATCHED A BLACKBIRD'
What a distance between ourselves and the bird!
"Sure" isn't even a thought that a bird has.
And the song is more challenge than joy. Absurd
really, thinking to match human feeling
to 'behaviour' like that. To see the beak as
'crocus' in colour is a kind of stealing
of a beauty from spring. The bird is handsome,
certainly, tuneful the singing to human
ears, but no more than that! — What an unwelcome
way to interpret a poem! Enter illusion.
And confuse what is yours and what is his,
for illusion is all: that is what hope is.'
(p. 827)
56. SO VARIOUS' 6
So various — 'all mankind's epitome'.
Here are a dozen men transformed into one.
And it's Hardy, who by some strange alchemy
metamorphoses identity. But wait —
as you read, all these cameos lose their fun:
memories sting you, enough to dislocate
your identity too, for have you not been
'staunch' and 'robust' as a lover, and 'fickle'
as the moon, and a cheerful, busy machine;
next, 'unadventurous', dull; then, logical,
and clear-headed and wise? You sustain no loss
in a pilgrimage, a Stations of the Cross.
(pp. 830-2)
6 John Dryden, 'Absalom and Achitophel', ll. 545-6
57. 'HE NEVER EXPECTED MUCH
A CONSIDERATION
{A reflection] ON MY EIGHTY-SIXTH BIRTHDAY
But there could be no 'strain and ache' without hope.
This was a principle far from indifference.
Inside hope must be that allows one to cope,
shrugging off failure, suffering, betrayal.
It could never be certain. No impatience,
no acquiescence. Believe love impossible
while believing it possible. To endure
long past endurance, convinced of deliverance,
knowing denial determined to immure
one for eternity. Taking severance
for success, and success for loss. Thus you make
hope (without any trouble) from strain and ache.
(p. 846)
58. 'BOYS THEN AND NOW'
How consoling to think that there was but one
cuckoo! A sign of the thoughtfulness of change
in that even this bird's call, that everyone
took to be plodding and stupid, still assured
us of stable, familiar goodwill. How strange
not to suppose it came especially secured
in the turnings of time to tootle the spray,
April's awakening, all the assemblies
of the daffodils, all the white clouds of may-
blossom, the constellations of daisies,
all the promise of years. But recognition
was of only another's repetition.
(p. 847)
59. 'HE RESOLVES TO SAY NO MORE'
There is petulance here, a blind-spirited
spite. What occasioned this outburst? Note, his last
few attempts at poetic voice, dull-witted
echoes of earlier irony, betray
a declining of skill, of subtlety past:
verse where the Gothic's turned morbid, words astray
in the mouths of his characters, ghost voices
stilted, antique, self-pitying monologues
that profess no ambition, no hard choices,
aiming to hide disillusion — it befogs
the plain fact of his age thus to snub us all.
It's most human to speak. Words like this appal.
(p. 887)