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.
|