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.
Last edited by Tim Murphy; 07-21-2009 at 07:07 AM.
|