POETS Day! Thomas Hardy Learns About Dames
Illustration by Rene Sears
We’re suffering Sudden Onset Fall. The leaves all dropped yesterday. Crunchy steps echo in the dark because dusk is a five minute period between school pick-up and the dog expecting dinner. I need a sweater to take my evening walk with my wife and by the time I get to the creek – I assume there’s a creek because there was a few days ago though I can’t see it without a flashlight – I need a coat.
When my wife and I started dating we were free and laughing, uncaring and unworried about what others thought. We’re all that stuff now, but with worse knees. Still, I’m suddenly caring about what others think a great deal when walking next to my bride as she’s decked out in a halogen beaming nylon harness get-up with safety red lights warning traffic off us. It’s a ridiculous get-up that I find prudent only because it’s so bright no one can make out our faces for the glare.
Make it a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Don’t let work pin you in and take what little sunlight God and Congress have allowed. Get out of there and enjoy yourselves.
Wear a sweater.
***
I’ve read praises of Thomas Hardy from Auden, Pound, Ransom, Larkin, and Frost. That’s a short list with recognizable notables to make the point that he’s respected by those whose respect is worthy of attention, but that list is far from exhaustive. Hardy was considered by many to be the greatest literary mind of his time and Max Gate, as his home in Dorchester was known, the end point of pilgrimages by Sassoon and Graves; again, not exhaustive. He was held in awe.
I’ve always admired him. At first, I thought he was a good poet. I wasn’t astonished or anything like that, but I was impressed. Some poems, I didn’t like. I still don’t. He has an occasional habit of not knowing when he should be embarrassed by a childlike phrase, but each time I read I found more to admire in that which I liked.
I’m not immune from the sort of self-flattery that arises when someone whose writing I respect enforces a gut felt but not fully considered opinion. From “Thomas Hardy & American poetry”, The New Criterion, December 1999 by David Yezzi, “I would agree with Philip Larkin that one can browse in Hardy ‘for years and years and still be surprised.’” The someone whose writing I respect here being someones as I think highly of both Yezzi and Larkin.
Yezzi included a quotation from Mark Van Doren in his article:
“no poet more stubbornly resists selection. . . . There is no core of pieces, no inner set of classic or perfect poems, which would prove his rank. . . . It is the whole of him that registers and counts.”
The excisions were all Yezzi’s. He did the hard work of finding and trimming Van Doren’s opinion.
Over time I’ve found more of Hardy to enjoy, and even found that I’ve come around to some poems I didn’t initially care for. I most enjoy his simplicity in language, his allowances for ambiguity, and the prominence he gives small gestures and details of setting as evidence of something greater.
That said, his simplicity is often set off by something discordantly high or low, a misfit complication that makes the reader wonder if he put it in as a place holder and on revision shrugged his attention to the next work. His ambiguity works because he demonstrates clarity in most cases, and he’s not immune from filling the page with one big unsubtle metaphor as evidence of exactly what you cannot miss it to mean.
Hardy wrote “Neutral Tones” was published in the collection Wessex Poems and Other Verses in 1898. It was his first collection, comprising works written over a great many uncollected years. My copy of Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems dates “Neutral Tones” as written in 1867. If correct, the mood comes years before meeting, falling in love with, and disastrously marrying Emma Gifford, who considered herself his social superior and according to Wikipedia and whatever providence they cribbed it from, “Her delusions of grandeur grew more marked. Never forgetting that she was an archdeacon’s niece who had married beneath her …” I had to read that twice. Imagining someone saying, “Well, my uncle…” without her audience stepping back with “Wait. So, you’re not directly… were you raised by…? Didn’t you work as a governess?”
Emma eventually moved into an attic apartment at Max Gate and they endured a same-house estrangement. I’ve read but can’t confirm that they would go years without speaking.
During that time he had what were, though I hesitate to call them, affairs. After Emma’s death he remarried, apparently happily, though he continued to write poems about his first wife and seems to be plumbing for his culpability. If and what that he may have done in that regard I’m unaware. Until today when my wife pointed out that “1867” was written at the end, I was of the opinion this was a self-prescribed Hail Mary for his sins.
“Neutral Tones” was written when he leaned on the “novelist” in the descriptor “poet/novelist.” Though he claimed to disregard the opinions of reviewers (In his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves describes several wrought instances of Hardy animatedly not caring about critical opinion), it’s believed that critical reception of Tess of the d’Ubervilles and later Jude the Obscure led him to abandon novel writing completely in favor of poetry. This would have been earlier, the poems possibly a diversion he never bothered to compile into a volume.
It’s a stark poem. “The sun was white,” “a pond edged with grayish leaves.” Of all the Hardy lines I’ve read, none strike as sharply as “The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing / Alive enough to have strength to die.”
Neutral Tones
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
– They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing….Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
