Thanks for pulling this up, Tim, and to Sam for rekindling the interest.

I first encountered Hardy when I was way too young to know what the hell I was reading. I had discovered Frost -- my first serious poet -- and Hardy was mentioned by some commentator as an influence. Hardy and Robinson. That is how my haphazard poetry education began and proceeded -- I looked up the names mentioned in blurbs and bios.

Anyway, I skimmed some big thick library book I had no business checking out looking for short poems, and found a few I could handle. "The Self-Unseeing" stood out. The final line instantly locked into my brain. Here it is along with another I came to love, "The Weary Walker."

I think they are worth looking at together to see just how controlled a metrist Hardy was. First of all, they show his mastery of short lines -- a progenitor of Timeter? But, beyond that, look how in "The Self-Unseeing" nearly every line starts with a stress and is end-stopped (contained like vivid, arrested memories). Compare that to "The Weary Walker" with all its enjambments and mid-line caesuras (rambling like a neverending road). The meter and punctuation in "The Self-Unseeing" are so strong, there is only one way to read the thing. On the other hand, if you read "The Weary Walker" as though it is end-stopped, you will stumble and it will sound awful. If you read it in normal speech cadences, trusting the grammar and punctuation, it sings. He knows how to play the reader like an instrument.


"The Self-Unseen"

Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.

She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.

Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!


"The Weary Walker"

A plain in front of me,
.....And there's the road
Upon it. Wide country.
.....And, too, the road!

Past the first ridge another,
.....And still the road
Creeps on. Perhaps no other
.....Ridge for the road?

Ah! Past that ridge a third,
.....Which still the road
Has to climb furtherward --
.....The thin white road!

Sky seems to end its track;
.....But no. The road
Trails down the hill at the back.
.....Ever the road.



David R.

Eliot is revered as such a great critic, yet he wrote an essay arguing that compared to the majestic Tennyson, Hardy is a metrical barbarian, proof that Eliot himself was a metrical idiot.

I was too immature for really fathoming Hardy or Frost until I was about forty. I read them in bulk, but I just didn't bring to their books the life experience needed to appreciate them as I do now, when I believe they are the two greatest lyric poets in our language, in the above order.

So David, Iambic Timeter derives entirely from Yeats, the overwhelming influence of my youth. It was Alan who pointed out that my "Epigrammatic Paradise Lost" (as one critic put it,) is formally identical to Wound and Dust of Snow. I wasn't thinking of either of those masterpieces when I wrote, rather about what a blazing, rainless spring was doing to my mortgaged acres.

The Expulsion

Six weeks of drought,
the corn undone
and wheat burned out
by the brazen sun--

over that land
an angel stands
with an iron brand
singeing his hands.

But while the poem came of my own crisis, I have to admit I had the Frost and Hardy memorized when I wrote it, still do! Here's a late Hardy masterpiece never anthologized. I only know it because of Bob Mezey, and when I read it to my father in the last year of his life, he was utterly enchanted. Hardy indents it properly:

Proud Songsters



The thrushes sing as the sun is going,

And the finches whistle in ones and pairs,

And as it gets dark loud nightingales

In bushes

Pipe, as they can when April wears,

As if all Time were theirs.



These are brand new birds of twelvemonths' growing,

Which a year ago, or less than twain,

No finches were, nor nightingales,

Nor thrushes,

But only particles of grain,

And earth, and air, and rain.

If I had to choose a favorite poem this might be it, for it is an entirely original take on the great theme, mutatis mutandis, original because it contemplates the thrushes' nearness to their origins, not their endings. Pound had it right: "And what will our generation have to show beside Thomas Hardy's 800 poems?" He has become my lodestar, just as he is for Mezey and was for Warren and Ransom.

PS. Actually, Caleb anthologized it at Poemtree.com, and he deserves credit for doing so.

Tim,

"Proud Songsters" is in my 1995 edition of the Everyman's Library pocket Hardy. I love how the earth, air, and rain sonically "evolve" in the final line.

You mention the Pound quote -- I think Hardy wrote more like 900 poems. (Editing in -- I just read something that said 947! and most of them in the last thrity or forty years of his life, right?!). It's funny, my 1940 G. M. Young Selected has about 110, and the Everyman's has about 140 -- there are only about 15 that the two volumes have in common. And there are still others neither has that are contained in some broader anthologies I have. It is one thing to be prolific, but to be that prolific at such high level is supernatural. Not to mention his dozen or so novels, half of which are regarded now as classics of the language, and a couple collections of short stories for good measure. That's a lot of high-quality output. I said "supernatural," an uncharacteristic choice of words for me, but maybe not far from the truth:

On A Midsummer Eve

I idly cut a parsley stalk,
And blew therein towards the moon;
I had not thought what ghosts would walk
With shivering footsteps to my tune.

I went, and knelt, and scooped my hand
As if to drink, into the brook,
And a faint figure seemed to stand
Above me, with the bygone look.

I lipped rough rhymes of chance, not choice,
I thought not what my words might be;
There came into my ear a voice
That turned a tenderer verse for me.



David R.

Well, Timmy, if Eliot missed Hardy, at least Pound saw him: "no one taught me anything about writing since Thomas Hardy died."

And he was Dylan Thomas's "favourite poet of the century."

There is so much about Hardy that reminds me of Donne:

"It is an art that places expressive function before "beauty". It directs, ideally speaking, distinct, particular attention to each word and phrase. Without this heightened attention, a great many of Hardy's poems will not be much enjoyed, for they will seem dull, prosy, eccentric, and lame - sketchy incidents of a predictable kind, diction that is odd without purpose or appeal, jolting meters, awkward metaphors, and an inert, flattening tone of voice. But with attention, the real 'plot' and interest of many a poem takes hold. One follows the suspense, hesitation, and fluctuation of feeling and interpretation, the deeply pondered play of meaning." - David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, p 148.

As many critics have pointed out, Hardy is the great poet of marriage and relationship. And I could quote a hundred poems. But this one has always impressed me:

In the Nupital Chamber

'O THAT mastering tune!' And up in the bed
Like a lace-robed phantom springs the bride;
'And why?' asks the man she had that day wed,
With a start, as the band plays on outside.
'It's the townsfolk's cheery compliment
Because of our marriage, my Innocent.'

'O but you don't know! 'Tis the passionate air
To which my old Love waltzed with me,
And I swore as we spun that none should share
My home, my kisses, till death, save he!
And he dominates me and thrills me through,
And it's he I embrace while embracing you!'

Hardy
 

Here's my own favorite Hardy sonnet, another one from "Satires of Circumstance":

IN THE ROOM OF THE BRIDE-ELECT

"Would it had been the man of our wish!"
Sighs her mother. To whom with vehemence she
In the wedding- dress - the wife to be -
"Then why were you so mollyish
As not to insist on him for me!"
The mother, amazed: "Why, dearest one,
Because you pleaded for this or none!"

"But Father and you should have stood out strong!
Since then, to my cost, I have lived to find
That you were right and that I was wrong;
This man is a dolt to the one declined...
Ah! - here he comes with his button-hole rose.
Good God - I must marry him I suppose!"

This is a great thread--thanks for blowing the dust off it, Tim. I'm ashamed of myself that I don't know Hardy's poetry that well--I know his novels much more. This thread is giving me a jolt, and I'm looking forward to getting into his poetry more. He really is such a subtle writer.

I looked up the original Pound quote, out of curiosity. Actually, it's interesting to see that Pound changed his tune about Hardy.

In 1918 he wrote:

"We may, I think, set aside Thomas Hardy as of an age not our own, perhaps Walter Scott's . . . remote from us and from things familiarly under our hand." --from his essay on Henry James in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, p. 331.

In the 1930s he wrote:

"A conscientious critic might be hard put to it to find just praise for Hardy's poems. When a writer's matter is stated with such entirety and with such clarity there is no place left for the explaining critic. When the matter is of so stark a nature and so clamped to reality, the eulogist looks an ass. . . . poem after poem of Hardy's leaves one with nowt more to say. . . . When we, if we live long enough, come to estimate the 'poetry of the period', against Hardy's 600 pages we will put what?" --Guide to Kulchur, p. 285.

And, Mark, you'll like this one, also from the 1930s:

"Thomas Hardy's Noble Dames and Little Ironies will find readers despite all the French theories in the world." --ABC of Reading, p. 193.

In the interests of science, I'm going to attempt to merge Sam's first Hardy thread with this one. This will be the first time I've used this capability of the board's new software, so I don't really know what what happen. So I beg your patience if things look strange and I hope you'll just carry on!

What fun! Science as roullette? Who knows where the thread (the string), or ball, or me or you, will land? :D

Thanks Tim, Sam, Maryann et al.:

When my wife and I were held up in my grandmother's creaky old house outside Atlanta, I heard a recording of Richard Burton reading "Weathers":

This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly;
And the little brown nightingale bills his best,
And they sit outside at 'The Traveller's Rest,'
And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest,
And citizens dream of the south and west,
And so do I.

This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I;
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh and ply;
And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.

And here's one many of you know. Hardy could laugh! I had my students memorize this this year and had them do the parts: God, the unknown skeleton, the narrator and Parson Thirdly--who should have stuck to pipes and beer instead of preaching forty year.


Channel Firing

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgement-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worm drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God cried, "No;
It's gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

"All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

"That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them's a blessed thing,
For if it were they'd have to scour
Hell's floor for so much threatening. . . .

"Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need)."

So down we lay again. "I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,"
Said one, "than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!"

And many a skeleton shook his head.
"Instead of preaching forty year,"
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
"I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer."

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

Lance, the rhythm of the last line of Channel Firing is the most mind-boggling metrical tour de force I'd ever encountered at eighteen. And in the ensuing forty years' reading, I've yet to encounter better.