Critical Evaluation
It is frequently said of Thomas Hardy that he turned to the writing of poetry as a result of his anger and disappointment at the shortsighted and discouraging critical response to his last novel, Jude the Obscure, which appeared in 1895. The truth of the matter appears to be that he had always preferred writing poetry to writing novels, and that he had written poetry before he presented himself to the reading public as a novelist and short story writer. He returned to his first love and decided to publish his poems only after he had established for himself a firm reputation as a novelist. Some of the verses which he included in his first volume of poems, Wessex Poems, had been composed more than thirty years before. He was then fifty-eight years old, and for the next thirty years he devoted himself exclusively to writing or rewriting his poems until his death in 1928.
His Collected Poems, retains almost a thousand poems which had appeared in eight preceding volumes of verse. This number testifies to his affection for and dedication to poetry, but it is too large an output to allow him to maintain consistent excellence. A few, relative to the large total, must be deemed outright failures, deficient either because of metrical inconsistency or inappropriateness, eccentric, excessive inversion, awkward diction, or an imagery and idea of embarrassing sentimentality. At the other end of the spectrum of his achievement, however, there are a few poems, again relatively speaking, which are extremely successful and claim the right to a permanent place in the ideal anthology of great and memorable poems in the English language. These poems, together with the large number which are at least interesting and competent, constitute a respectable body of work worthy of attention and high regard.
As might be expected, Hardy’s poetry complements and intensifies the unhappy vision of life depicted in most of his novels. Hardy protested in an introductory note to his final volume of poems, Winter Words, that he had not attempted to present a “harmonious philosophy” in that book or in any of his earlier poetic work. Despite these protestations, however, there can be no question that an easily discernible, special “Hardyesque” vision of life emerges from his poetry as well as from his prose. Cast in the form of imaginative art, it may not have the rigidity or discipline of what we call philosophy, but it offers, nevertheless, a very consistent, even relentless view of life as a series of adventures in frustration and defeat. Man as an individual, man as a creature of society and the cosmos, is simply acting out the whims and dictates of an inexorable life force, a blind, indifferent, neutral Immanent Will. Though the Will (variously called Fate, Chance, Hap, Destiny, and Necessity) is ostensibly neutral about man’s fate, the general reality is that man usually becomes “time’s laughstock,” his efforts to achieve love and dignity and significance simply create “satires of circumstance.” These concepts emerge so clearly and triumphantly from his novels and poems because, while they may be few and schematic, they were for him matters of fundamental, abiding concern, and he used them constantly as the basis and the framework of his vision.
The themes and the vision which emerge from the poetry is almost wholly clouded and pessimistic. This was the way Hardy himself summed up the consensus of many reviews of his poetical work (“Apology,” Late Lyrics and Earlier ) a judgment which he deemed “odd.” But the real oddity is that he should think this judgment...
(This entire section contains 1879 words.)
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strange because there can be little question that the corpus of his work is in general and quite consistently dark and sad and pessimistic. Hardy contended that the alleged pessimism was in truth a way of questioning and exploring the nature of reality, a first step, as he called it, toward the betterment of man’s soul and body. To this end he quoted in his defense a line from an earlier poem, “In Tenebris”:If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst:
a perspective which he labeled, perhaps in desperation, “evolutionary meliorism.”
To point a way to the Better may have been his intention, but the fact is that he succeeded all too well in giving us a full look at the Worst; in his poetry there is very little, indeed only the barest hint scattered here and there, about the way to the Better. What little there is stresses the conjectural “if” in his poetical statements and the many qualifications which abound in his prose clarification. In his poetry there is very little of loving-kindness operating through scientific or any other kind of knowledge, and what free will we can see apparently works to the detriment of all, victor and victim alike.
In form, the poetry is fairly conventional. Hardy frequently exploited the forms of folk tradition: popular ballads, hymns, country songs, but there are many sonnets, couplets, dramatic monologues, narratives, and conversational anecdotes. Most are poems with a plot; that is, Hardy develops his theme through a highly concentrated, epitomized dramatic situation. This method has the value of establishing a distance between Hardy the man and Hardy the poet. The poem may actually be the outpouring of Hardy’s secret heart, but the externalized narrative or dramatic situation presents the theme in a way that detaches it from Hardy himself. The poems which are narrative monologues or dialogues, and there are many, are not concerned with the creation of character. They are concerned with presenting a view of the world, Hardy’s “dramatic truth” for which the speakers or their situation are more or less the actors. There are a few (relatively speaking again) “philosophical” poems which deal directly and explicitly with Hardy’s thesis. They represent only a small proportion of the total poetic production but they have attracted a disproportionate amount of attention precisely because their didactic and abstract quality, stripped of character and situation, reveals Hardy’s viewpoint so clearly and starkly. Actually, they are like footnotes that clarify a text; if we want a fair characterization of the bulk of Hardy’s poems we must not take the footnotes for the text.
The meters in many of the poems are not skillfully handled, especially in some poems which we know were of early composition. To the modern ear, there is a vaguely anachronistic quality about some of these poems, much of it sounding “poetical” in an old-fashioned way. There is some use of dialect terms, some word-coinages, a few obsolete words. On occasion, Hardy attracted too much attention to these words—most of them making for clumsy, gnarled lines—by inverting normal syntax for the sake of the regularity of his meter or to meet the demands of a rhyme. These inversions contribute to the artificial and contrived quality of his unsuccessful poems.
The basic theme of these varied forms and meters is the cruel irony of a universe which does not, and apparently cannot, answer man’s desire, indeed, his hunger, for order, justice, equity, or even a rationale for his suffering. The forces or phenomena which oppose and frustrate man can be identified from the various forms—narratives, situations, characters, settings—through which this basic theme is illustrated and dramatized.
In Hardy’s world time erodes and corrodes the promise of youth, talent, hope, beauty, freshness, enthusiasm, and vibrancy. Love, in time, wastes away simply by being. Dreams grow weak and vague in time and soon lose their ability to inspire. If they survive, it is only to stand in mocking contrast to the disappointing reality outside. The body weakens; eyes dim; beauty vanishes in time, and too soon: death.
Death always seems to come too early or too late to provide whatever relief it may have offered; or it takes away the wrong person, meaning the good, and spares the ne’er-do-well.
Sex is a powerful force which victimizes all; which betrays unmarried girls into bearing illegitimate children; which compels them to betray the men they love; which distracts young men from their rightful careers and rightful destinies; which breaks up families, defies the security of traditional mores, and frequently leads to crime.
Love is fleeting, short-lived, and vulnerable; easily swayed, tempted, diverted, betrayed or betraying. Love is best at a distance, whether of time or in space, best when unconsummated and only dreamed of. When realized, it withers. It is a trap for women who must marry the wrong man and yearn for another, and who must therefore live in spiritual infidelity.
Society is viewed either as a system of tradition or security that is rapidly disappearing, or as the embodiment of outmoded ideas which destroy true lovers whose natural passions have betrayed them into defying the code. The rich girl may love the poor boy who loves her, but they are doomed to part because of the class system of society.
War is senseless, vicious, and inhumane. Invariably it is fought bravely but in ignorance by its victims, leaving wives, illegitimate children, and betrayal behind. The settings for these poems are Greek wars, Roman wars, colonial wars, Continental wars, world wars, culminating in the bitter “Christmas: 1924.”
Nature is generally seen as a powerful, blind force, an unknowing, well-intentioned, but blundering Mother, herself helpless in the grip of the heedless, inexorable Immanent Will. In the sense of the physical world about us, it is most often described as barren and bleak, shivering in the cold rain or snow or sleet, an outer weather to reflect the inner weather of the broken, desolate heart. If the scene is the beauty of spring or summer it is only to provide a mocking background to grief or to warn of the winter or death which lurks in or just behind the innocent beauty of the scene.
The setting for these experiences in frustration is frequently a graveyard, a sad, haunted house, an empty, crumbling church, or a desolate moor. Occasionally, we confront the whirling rapids of a river, suitable for a suicide or a killing. Sometimes it is a tavern where riotous drinking and dancing are betraying a young girl into straying, or a young wife into adultery.
Hardy’s is a poetry of action and drama, rarely a poetry of mere description. It is not often a poetry of song, but a poetry which moves at the pace of thoughtful speech or spoken thought. If we follow a division of poetry which Hardy himself once made, we may say that his poetry falls roughly into four categories: (1) passionate poems—his ballads and narratives of ballad-like incident; (2) sentimental poems—his poems of recollection and nostalgia, poems about love and lovers. (3) meditative poems—his introspective, first-person monologues. (4) fanciful poems—his poems of philosophical dialogues with Nature and such Powers or his poems of conversations with ghosts. For the most part, in these poems, Nature complains, God argues, and Man questions. But these poems, like most of Hardy’s poems, are designed to give dramatic identities and significances to the abstract idea that man, nature, and the universe are in the hands of the Immanent Will which operates powerfully but blindly, quite indifferent to the individual fate or destiny.
