The Ransom selection of Hardy is a curious book---
a wonderful introduction but a very odd choice of
poems; perhaps because of his own 19th century
theological preoccupations. In any case, he leaves
out a good many of Hardy's best things.
Caleb, it's not my business to correct your taste
or judgment---maybe time and more reading will do
the job. Alicia's poem is lovely but not Hardyesque,
as far as I can see. Also, Hardy has many poems in
which there are no awkwardnesses or eccentricities
of diction, just plain, accurate language and, always,
his marvelous ear. Here's an example:

TRANSFORMATIONS

Portion of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew,
Bosomed here at its foot:
This branch may be his wife,
A ruddy human life
Now turned to a green shoot.

These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I vainly tried to know
May be entering this rose.

So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
And they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!


We should all live to write half so well.

"Caleb, it's not my business to correct your taste or judgment---maybe time and more reading will do the job"

Egotistical comments like that are not going to do anything to improve my respect for your judgement.

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited August 08, 2001).]

Dr. Mezey, I'm curious about Hardy's relationship with his critics and his audience. His poetry must have been nearly guaranteed a certain amount of attention, because of his renown as a novelist. What was it's critical and popular reception? Was he ignored, dismissed, controversial, or well-received? Did opinion change during his lifetime?

Sorry---didn't mean to hurt your feelings. But
I don't know what to say to many of your comments.
Hardy is one of the great poets, perhaps the
greatest of the last century (in fact the last
two), and there's nothing idiosyncratic about
my passion for his work. Frost, Pound, Ransom,
Larkin, Yeats, Jeffers, Lowell, Larkin, etc etc
etc, regarded him as a master, and none of them
were easy to please. Furthermore, your complaint
about awkwardness is a very old one, made off and
on for a hundred years or so, and few readers of
Hardy take it seriously.

It's been said so often that Hardy's poetry is awkward because that's how many people feel! I can, and will, post examples (although, do I really need to? -- we all know it's true of at least some of his work). Even Richard Wilbur, in an interview reprinted in his Conversations book, expressed reservations. But as I said, I do like a great deal of Hardy's poetry, I just don't love it with a passion.

Mac, please don't Doctor me; the nearest I got
to a PhD was a BA in Classics---a very long
way from a Doctor. (My mother wanted me to be
a real doctor, the kind that makes a lot of
money, but I didn't even get to be a fake one.)
Your questions are very interesting and good
ones; to save myself the hour or two it would
take to answer them in the detail they deserve,
let me ask you to get hold of my little book
of Hardy's Selected Poems, published in the
Penguin Classics series for the modest price
of nine bucks---in my introduction, I begin
with the very questions you ask and go on
discussing them for most of the next 20-some
pages.
Caleb, I know you could produce many examples
of Hardy's awkwardness or eccentricity of diction,
as any reader could, but they are often
to be found in his best poems and not only don't
mar them but partly account for their success.
For example, the opening stanza of To an
Unborn Pauper Child:

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBreathe not, hid heart: cease silently,
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTAnd though thy birth-hour beckons thee,
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTSleep the long sleep:
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTThe Doomsters heap
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTTravails and teens around us here,
And Time-wraiths turn our songsingings to fear.

Odd, yes, but powerful. And Hardy didn't use words
like teens because he didn't know any better---
when he used archaic and dialect words, it was usually
because they were the richest and most accurate words.
If you're not convinced, go read the whole thing and
see if it doesn't move you. In fact, Hardy is so
good, there's so much to him, so much heart and soul,
that he can survive much worse "flaws"--- in a long
poem I regretfully felt I must omit from my edition,
"A Conversation at Dawn," you have to wade through
some of the stiffest, most literary dialogue you can
imagine, and a melodramatic story, but it ends up
being worth it. A newly married man is talking to
his bride in a hotel room and asks her why she seems
so sad; she confesses that she had loved a man before
her marriage but they couldn't marry because he was
already married; but that the day before, she had
caught sight of him at a distance, at what turns out
to have been his wife's funeral. She says,

"He was there, but did not note me, veiled,
Yet I saw that a joy, as of one unjailed,
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTNow shone in his gaze;
He knew not his hope of me just had failed!"

Her husband is not happy to hear this, and pouts;
she feels she must tell him the whole truth and
further confesses that she had received a letter
from her lover that morning, "reminding [her]
faithfully of his claim," and that she had a
sudden hope that she might go to him and that
her husband could have their marriage annulled
if he wished. The husband, furious, says that
he won't release her from her vows; she must
stay with him and suffer. She then confesses
that she and her lover had married privately
and in secret, "a contract vain / To the world,
but real to Him on High." The husband realizes
that she is telling him that she had consummated
that private marriage and was not a virgin, and
he swears again that he'll keep her, however
sinful she had been and however much she wanted
to leave. She begs him again, and says that she
had married him only because she thought she
might be pregnant and was scared, and she reminds
him that he had told her before the wedding that
marriage is just a practical matter and that the
sentiments of the couple are immaterial. He won't
relent and insists that she kneel and "and [her]
king uncrown" and when she has done so, he says,

"Since you've played these pranks and given no sign,
You shall crave this man of yours; pine and pine
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTWith sighings sore,
Till I've starved your love for him; nailed you mine!"

Awful, huh? Yes, pretty bad. But here are the last
two stanzas:

"I'm a practical man, and want no tears;
You've made a fool of me, it appears;
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTThat you don't again
Is a lesson I'll teach you in future years."

She answered not, lying listlessly
With her dry dark eyes on the coppery sea,
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTThat now and then
Flung its lazy flounce at the neighbouring quay.


There it is. If that doesn't break your heart,
you have a heart of stone.

I approach narrative verse a little differently from lyrical verse, feeling that, since it is so long and requires a great deal of exposition, more clumsiness is permitted. Even so, I didn't find the verses you quoted to be particularly clumsy, especially the first verse. Nonetheless, some of it has a pedestrian quality which is inelegant. I like elegance.

Later tonight I'll post an example of clumsy Hardy verse -- a short poem, and not so dramatic as that.

On my site, I started an article about Hardy but never finished it. Here is the first stanza of the poem that I used to exemplify Hardy's awkwarness, from his poem "Shut Out That Moon":

Close up the casement, draw the blind,
~~ Shut out that stealing moon,
She wears too much the guise she wore
~~ Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
~~ On a white stone were hewn.

The awkwardness starts with "stealing", though I'll let that pass because it's debatable. The real awkwardness starts with the 4th line, "Before our lutes were strewn / With years-deep dust". Apparently, Hardy was using the word "lute" as a metaphor for life, though it isn't an appropriate symbol for life -- it could be used to symbolize creativity, but creativity isn't the subject of the poem. A lute is a small object, and it is inappropriate to say that it is "strewn" with dust -- a larger area might be "strewn" with something, but certainly not a small item like a lute. Furthermore, dust is never "strewn" on anything; dust settles on things. It's clear that he chose "strewn" simply to rhyme with "hewn".

Even I, with my meager talent, can come up with an improved line:

She wears too much the guise she wore
~~ Before our lives were strewn
With time's debris, and names we read
~~ On a white stone were hewn.

His next lines -- "and names we read / On a white stone were hewn" -- have their own awkwardness. What he's apparently saying is, "before people died". The line is convoluted and I personally find little beauty in it. Indeed, all those lines have a convoluted quality. He should have scrapped the whole strewn/hewn rhyme and started over. "Strewn" and "hewn" aren't particularly sonorous words anyway.

The remainder of the poem isn't quite as awkward (though it's certainly depressing). But even if the remainder of the poem were gorgeous, it was already ruined in the first stanza. And that's what makes hardy so frustrating: he ruined a lot of otherwise good poems. At his worst, Hardy sounds like someone who slapped words together without any sense of appropriateness.

Here is the whole thing:

Shut Out That Moon

Close up the casement, draw the blind,
~~ Shut out that stealing moon,
She wears too much the guise she wore
~~ Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
~~ On a white stone were hewn.

Step not forth on the dew-dashed lawn
~~ To view the Lady's Chair,
Immense Orion's glittering form,
~~ The Less and Greater Bear:
Stay in; to such sights we were drawn
~~ When faded ones were fair.

Brush not the bough for midnight scents
~~ That come forth lingeringly,
And wake the same sweet sentiments
~~ They breathed to you and me
When living seemed a laugh, and love
~~ All it was said to be.

Within the common lamp-lit room
~~ Prison my eyes and thought;
Let dingy details crudely loom,
~~ Mechanic speech be wrought:
Too fragrant was Life's early bloom,
~~ Too tart the fruit it brought!


------------------
Caleb www.poemtree.com

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited August 11, 2001).]

Too bad you weren't around when Hardy was struggling
with his poems; you could have taught him a lot.
I think "stealing" is a good word: it calls up not
only the movement of the moon across the sky but
the suggestion of all that time has stolen from him
and his wife. The lutes stand not so much for life
as for young love & courtship & song; as it happens,
Hardy was a very good violinist, but lutes are stringed
instruments more apt in this context. And "strewn"
is adequate, at least; it has a number of meanings
and can certainly mean dusted or covered as with a
powder. A bit literary? Yes; and okay with me. The
rest of the sentence doesn't seem all that convoluted,
and "white" is an excellent touch. I would agree that
the poem has flaws and is here and there a bit too
poetical, and maybe a little awkward too; but it's
still alive and convincing. Not among his greatest
lyrics, but good enough, and better than many much
smoother and more graceful poems. If you're looking
for elegance, Hardy's not your man. He has something
better than elegance to offer.
Well, that's enough, more than enough. Hardy doesn't
need to be defended.

Dear Caleb,

There's some pretty clumsy, indeed inept, blank verse in Shakespeare's plays. Come to think of it, many of Homer's dactylic hexameters aren't nearly as smooth or polished as Virgil's. Maybe you could rewrite them too?