POETS Day! Thomas Hardy
Week 0 of the college football season doesn’t count. We know this because it’s called Week 0. Other than provide a chance for Notre Dame to be Oiyrish! in front of the Irish, not much is expected nor delivered. Real Football begins now. As of this writing the Thursday sacrifice of Elon to Wake Forrest remote-button-bounce to Kent State at UCF and all the Big12 giggling that involves is on the horizon. Both are appetizers to what I suspect will be a reportedly more than decent Utah hosting an abysmal Florida (who I still think pulls this out [oops]). I’ll keep UAB on a laptop on the coffee table.
We’ve made it through the desert, our long national nightmare is over, Holy Thursday, morning has broken, etc. Now is the Autumn of our content and no right minded company worth working for would bother making you pretend through the afternoon that you were mentally where you were supposed to be when your thoughts are flitting about Bryant-Denny and the Coliseum.
No need to call it a POETS Day this week. Freedom’s in the air; miasma but a good kind. Still, for form’s sake: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.
The season is upon us. Start it of right with a little verse, an appreciative pause, and then a heartfelt “Roll Tide!”
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“Thomas Hardy’s Noble Dames and Little Ironies will find readers despite all the French theories in the world.”
– Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading
Most of the world regards Thomas Hardy as a novelist. He wrote fourteen of them, though I have to confess I’ve not read a one. Amazon tells me that I will have a copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge by ten o’clock tomorrow night. I’m a little afraid to open it up.
I’m of a view of pessimism that states it’s seeing only the wrong in things and expecting decline if not stasis. I hesitate to place that on Hardy as in his poetry there is a gloomy assessment of things as they are but that should be no surprise when assessing gloomy things.
It’s hard to see him as disappointed when he never expected much. As he wrote in his poem “He Never Expected Much,” “Never, I own, expected I/That life would all be fair,” and further in The World answers “I do not promise overmuch,/Child; overmuch;/Just neutral tinted haps and such.” Peter Casagrande writes in the free teaser to his surprisingly expensive essay “The Fourteenth Line of ‘In Tenebris II’” that that fourteenth line, “Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst,” is Hardy trying “to illustrate what he thought of as his fundamental optimism, his ‘evolutionary meliorism’ as he called it there in a spirited reply to charges that his poetry was pessimistic.”
I never thought of his poetry as pessimistic. He writes of sad things, and he certainly takes a jaundiced eye to things, but in the latter case often with humor. One my favorites:
At a Hasty Wedding
If hours be years the twain are blest,
For now they solace swift desire
By bonds of every bond the best,
If hours be years. The twain are blest
Do eastern stars slope never west,
Nor pallid ashes follow fire:
If hours be years the twain are blest,
For now they solace swift desire.
That’s funny, not pessimistic. I’ve read that he goes full bore after marriage as an institution in Jude the Obscure, but again, I’ve never read the novels.
His own marriage, the first one, was a disaster. His wife, Emma, left after several years never to communicate with him again. Upon her death he destroyed a volume of her writing called What I Think of My Husband. “Bitter denunciations,” he wrote according to Norton’s Anthology. “Venom, hatred, and Abuse.” His novel readers may have cause to say that she despaired of his pessimism. Not being amongst them I’m inclined towards reports of her mental frailties. I doubt he expected to find what she wrote.
He wrote a series of sixteen poems – part eulogies, part therapy – collected under the title Poems 1912-1913 as he travelled to where they met and lived and reminisced about their time together. They are considered among his finest works. Hardy biographer Claire Tomalin claims the death of his wife signals “the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet,” and calls the Emma poems the “finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry.”
As a Hardy fan, I think the poems range from very good to batty, but when they’re batty… From “Lament”:
And we are here staying
Amid these stale things
Who care not for gaying,
And those junketings
That used to so joy her,
And never to cloy her
As us they cloy!… But
She is shut, she is shut
From the cheer of them, dead
To all done and said
In her yew-arched bed.
Much was made of Hardy by Modern poets. Jeffery Meyers notes in The New Criterion, “September 2002, “Thomas Hardy and the warriors,” “The last of the great Victorian writers, Hardy was the only one to span the Edwardian and Georgian periods and take an active role in postwar literature —a modern without being a modernist.” He served as a godfather, a sage destination away in Max Gate, his Dorchester house. For visitors such as Sigfried Sassoon, T.E. Lawrence, and Robert Graves he was a tie to traditional forms and for some such as Ezra Pound he was an experimenter and innovator within them.
Robert Graves wrote of a visit to Max Gate in his autobiography Goodbye to All That. It has been debated whether critical reaction to, or rather against, Tess of the d”Urburvilles and later Jude the Obscure caused Hardy to abandon novel writing in 1895 and dedicate himself to poetry. Barring a newly uncovered letter or work by Hardy stating explicitly one way or another it’s unlikely we’ll know, but Graves’ telling of the visit leads me to believe that Hardy was much affected by critical opinion.
“He regarded professional critics as parasites, no less noxious than autograph-hunters, wished the world rid of them, and also regretted having listened to them as a young man… And still the critics were plaguing him. One of them complained of a line: ‘his shape smalled in the distance.’ Now what in the world else could he have written? Hardy then laughed a little.”
and,
“We left the next day, after another of Hardy’s attacks on the critics at breakfast. He complained that they accused him of pessimism. One critic singled out as an example of gloom his poem on the woman whose house burned down on her wedding night. ‘Of course it’s a humorous piece,’ said Hardy, ‘and the man must have been thick-witted not to see that.’”
There’s a moment where Graves captures Hardy in his elder statesman role.
“After tea we went into the garden, where he asked to see some of my new poems. I fetched him one, and he wondered whether he might offer a suggestion: the phrase ‘the scent of thyme’, which occurred in it, was, he said, one of the clichés which poets of his generation had studied to avoid. Could I perhaps alter it? When I replied that his contemporaries had avoided it so well that I could now use it without offence, he withdrew the objection.”
Here’s a bit of light amongst Victorian gloom, written December 31, 1900, the last day of the nineteenth century and twenty-two days before the end of Victoria herself. This I would call pessimistic, but there is hope of hope he can’t decern. What does that make it?
The Darkling Thrush
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
Finally, we have what many consider Hardy’s greatest work. I’ll not put this in the pessimistic or nah ledger. It’s the end of The Great War. Relief that it’s over is mixed with exasperation that it happened at all.
Jefferey Meyers, again from “Thomas Hardy & the warriors” in New Criterion, writes that this poem “expressed the qualities that most strongly appealed to the war poets: colloquial diction, sharp irony, cunning technique, complexity of theme, and clarity of vision as well as his characteristic sympathy and wisdom.”
It’s a bridge between generational styles.
And There Was a Great Calm
(On the Signing of the Armistice, 11 Nov. 1918)
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)I
There had been years of Passion—scorching, cold,
And much Despair, and Anger heaving high,
Care whitely watching, Sorrows manifold,
Among the young, among the weak and old,
And the pensive Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”II
Men had not paused to answer. Foes distraught
Pierced the thinned peoples in a brute-like blindness,
Philosophies that sages long had taught,
And Selflessness, were as an unknown thought,
And “Hell!” and “Shell!” were yapped at Lovingkindness.III
The feeble folk at home had grown full-used
To ‘dug-outs’, ‘snipers’, ‘Huns’, from the war-adept
In the mornings heard, and at evetides perused;
To day-dreamt men in millions, when they mused—
To nightmare-men in millions when they slept.IV
Waking to wish existence timeless, null,
Sirius they watched above where armies fell;
He seemed to check his flapping when, in the lull
Of night a boom came thencewise, like the dull
Plunge of a stone dropped into some deep well.V
So, when old hopes that earth was bettering slowly
Were dead and damned, there sounded ‘War is done!’
One morrow. Said the bereft, and meek, and lowly,
‘Will men some day be given to grace? yea, wholly,
And in good sooth, as our dreams used to run?’VI
Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance
To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,
As they had raised it through the four years’ dance
Of Death in the now familiar flats of France;
And murmured, ‘Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?’VII
Aye; all was hushed. The about-to-fire fired not,
The aimed-at moved away in trance-lipped song.
One checkless regiment slung a clinching shot
And turned. The Spirit of Irony smirked out, ‘What?
Spoil peradventures woven of Rage and Wrong?’VIII
Thenceforth no flying fires inflamed the gray,
No hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn,
No moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray;
Worn horses mused: ‘We are not whipped to-day;’
No weft-winged engines blurred the moon’s thin horn.IX
Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency;
There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;
Some could, some could not, shake off misery:
The Sinister Spirit sneered: ‘It had to be!’
And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, ‘Why?’
My Mayor of Casterbridge grows closer by the moment. I may be descending into the pessimistic ballast to “At a Hasty Wedding,” but I doubt it. Enjoy the weekend (Roll Tide!).
