SOURCE: Riquelme, John Paul. “The Modernity of Thomas Hardy's Poetry.” In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Dale Kramer, pp. 204-23. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Riquelme deconstructs a number of Hardy's poems in an attempt to define what makes them “modern.”]

HARDY AMONG THE MODERNISTS

As with literary Romanticisms, a variety of literary modernisms can be described, and no description of modernism as a singular, determinate movement will gain universal assent.¹ Among the varieties of poetic modernism, Thomas Hardy's is distinctive because of its class-inflected, skeptical, self-implicating tendencies. The modernity of Hardy's poetry reveals itself in highly ambiguous language, in a resistance to conventional attitudes and hierarchies involving nature and society, in the transforming of lyric traditions, and in an insistence by means of negativity on the possibility of achieving a defiant, permanently revolutionary freedom to choose and to refuse. It is worth admitting at the outset, however, that any depiction of Hardy's modernism is of necessity a selective affair. There is evidence of Hardy's modernity in poems that span the entire period of his career as a publishing poet from 1898 through 1928. Considering that Hardy's collected poetry consists of more than nine hundred texts, not including The Dynasts, a variety of patterns and tendencies can be identified. Primary to my reading of his modernity are poems that reflect on nature and on Romantic attitudes, war poetry, elegies, and poems that use negative language prominently.

Out of Hardy's poems emerge new options for the elegy and for lyric poetry, options that make it possible for later writers to pursue alternatives to other influential poetic modernisms, especially those associated with Yeats and Eliot. All three poets challenge the singular character of the self. But Hardy's style is neither abstract nor fragmented in the manner of Eliot, who uses ambiguous pronoun references, multiple literary allusions, and a group speech based on liturgical language, among other techniques, to disrupt the continuity and spontaneity of the individual voice. Hardy projects at times an anti-self comparable in some ways to the anti-self in Yeats, but he does so in a less mellifluous style. Yeats and Eliot respond in one way to the crass, secularized character of modern culture by turning to the spiritual, that is, by directing attention in some of their poetry to visionary or Christian truths. Hardy also protests against the abusive, destructive, self-destructive tendencies of his society, but his response tends to focus on a recognizably human world of personal relations, work, and death.

HARDY AGAINST THE ROMANTICS

Hardy's transformations of poetic traditions result in arresting elegies that are in salient ways both anti-elegiac and unconsoling and in lyrics that present the voice falling silent or that prominently include figures of speech that go against the grain of conventional lyric utterance. The unconsoling elegies and the lyrics in which voices are joined to silence and stillness emerge from a common impulse, to resist the tendency of elegies to provide comfort in situations of loss and the tendency of lyrics to present a voice in song or to humanize the world in a self-regarding, self-validating way. “No answerer I,” says the speaker of one of Hardy's early poems, “Nature's Questioning,” toward the end of a sequence of figurative crossings-over that typifies Hardy's modern imagination. Decades later the speaker in the poem that closes Hardy's final volume still “resolves to say no more.” Hardy's speakers in these poems adopt a position of principled silence.

In “Nature's Questioning,” published in Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898), Hardy's first volume, the ambiguous use of language and the implications of Hardy's figures of speech, especially figures involving voice, face, and negation, distinguish Hardy from his precursors and connect him to younger writers, including Yeats and Eliot. The title phrase, “Nature's Questioning,” is an amphiboly, an instance of language in which the meaning of the individual words is clear but the meaning of their combination is not. Hardy's title can mean both the questioning of nature by someone or something and the questioning that nature itself does of someone or something. This is an example of the genitive, or possessive, use of language in which subject and object are reversible.²

The poem opens with the speaker looking at nature and nature looking back in an instance of personification that suggests reversible relations. That is, nature is presented as if it possessed a human consciousness like the speaker's. Each observes the other, and the possibility of communication is implied, as it often is in personification:

          When I look forth at dawning, pool,
                    Field, flock, and lonely tree,
                    All seem to gaze at me
Like chastened children sitting silent in a school.

(CPW [Complete Poetical Works], I, p. 86)

In the word “dawning,” we encounter another example of irresolvably ambiguous language. The speaker may be looking forth at the pool and other aspects of the scene at dawn. Or the dawn may be an aspect of scene that the speaker has in view. The speaker looks at dawn in both the temporal and, grammatically speaking, objective senses; it is when he looks and part of what he looks at. The double meaning causes no insurmountable complication to understanding the poem, except that “dawn” is figurative, not just literal language, particularly since it occurs in the form of a gerund, “dawning.” The verbal noun communicates a process, not only a time and a scene. When something dawns on us, we become aware of a new situation or idea. While something is dawning on the speaker, what the speaker becomes aware of is the “dawning,” or coming into awareness, of the aspects of scene being observed. At the moment of dawn, the speaker looks at the dawn scene during his own dawning that is also the observing of something dawning on what he observes. When pressed in this way for implications, the convoluted play and looping back of the language are as complex and puzzling as the often more extravagant linguistic effects of later modernist writers. By anticipating and participating in a modernist direction, Hardy's early poetry marks the dawn of modernism.

Despite nature's personification and its apparent connection to the speaker, the poem's details do not reinforce the suggestion that nature has been humanized as a thinking being. Instead, nature and the speaker are presented, respectively, as stifled or speechless. This qualifying of personification's usual implication revises and challenges a central element in Romantic poetry in a manner that is typical of Hardy and of modernist poetry in general. The five stanzas in the poem's middle that focus on nature's “chastened children” present them as human but worn down, not at dawn but at the end of a long day with “faces dulled” by a teacher who has “cowed them.” The verb cow in this context clearly means intimidate, but Hardy would have known that some readers would register the homonymous noun cow, with its reference to a farm animal. Rather than a lapse in judgment, the incongruity is Hardy's joke about personification's humanizing aspect. There are no jokes in Wordsworth's use of this poetic trope. Hardy's humor causes a dislocation, since the bovine implication turns the humanized “flock” back into something less than human.

The lesson that humanized nature learns through education is not to be more aware but to be “cowed.” In that state, the only speech that “stirs,” described as “lippings mere,” emerges as questions about the children's origin and end. The emphasis on faces and voices that are moribund raises for the reader the question of how fully the natural world mirrors the human and in what ways. The evident suggestion is that this implicit questioning of nature points to a debilitation in nature that is the truth about humanity as well. Rather than recognizing itself in a lively, joyous, humanized nature, humanity is invited to see itself reflected in nature as “worn,” “forlorn,” and “dying.” Further, the force that has shaped nature is presented in nature's questions as itself less than fully human; it is imbecile and “impotent,” an “Automaton” that is “Unconscious.” In an obvious reference to the “embers” that guarantee the continuity between child and man in the ninth stanza of Wordsworth's “Immortality Ode,” the children suggest that they may be “live remains” but of something “dying downwards,” not likely to survive. With “brain and eye” gone, they are closer to being “remains” in the sense of a corpse than they are to being “live.”

The place of the human speaker appears in the seventh, and final, stanza. The poem raises questions about nature implicitly, but this “I” is not in dialogue with nature. He neither questions nature directly nor responds to nature's questioning with his own validating voice, a voice that, could it answer, might confirm the similarity between humanity and nature in positive terms. Instead, a step further toward dying downward than the children, the speaker is “No answerer I.” By choosing not to answer back or by being unable to do so, the “I” cuts itself off or is cut off from the possibility of continued speaking as a sign of life and thought on both sides of a dialogue. The children speak, perhaps to him, but he does not address them as Wordsworth addresses the child in the “Immortality Ode.”

The silence of not answering finds its stilly echo in elements of nature, “the winds, and rains,” and humanized natural “glooms and pains” that are, in another instance of ambiguous phrasing, “still the same.” Like the speaker, they have not been changed by the questioning. They are, like the “I” who does not answer, “still” or quiet; that is, they are “the same” as “I” as well as “still the same.” “Still” suggests not life and human consciousness, but death as well as quiet, especially in a poem that closes by presenting “Life and Death” as close neighbors. The implications here resemble those of the opening of Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in which “you and I” are presented as going “like a patient etherised upon a table,” or else, because of the irresolvably ambiguous phrasing, the “evening is spread out against the sky” like such an unconscious figure. In both poems, the border between the human and the natural has been crossed to suggest not that either one gains by the crossing over but that both are less, not more, conscious and lively than we might have thought. Self and nature are “etherised” or dulled. There is also a quality in Hardy's poem that resembles Samuel Beckett's work, with its emphasis on silence and the loss of parts and faculties. As in the ambiguous title of Beckett's “Stirrings Still,” what stirs in “Nature's Questioning” is all but still.

The modernist challenge to a Wordsworthian Romanticism emphasizing consolation is typical of Hardy's early poems. For instance, “In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury” (Wessex Poems) reverses the “Immortality Ode” by including no consolation for the changes that time has brought. Instead, it brings irony strongly to bear on time's passage by using a hymn stanza to present the lack of consolation. The poem also mixes styles by using both dialect and educated language; the mixture of high and low anticipates the mixture of styles in later poets. In Hardy, however, the low style creates the impression not of a mask worn by a refined speaker but of the speaker's lower-class origins. In an uncanny touch that replicates the crossovers of “Nature's Questioning,” Hardy illustrates the poem in an amphibolic way with a drawing of a landscape made up of fields, flocks, and trees over which is superimposed a pair of glasses. This is more than incongruous, since it is impossible to say whether the glasses are those of the viewer who looks at nature or those of nature looking back at us. In the drawing and the poem, the fit between the human and the natural is less than close, comfortable, or determinate.

The poem following “Nature's Questioning” in Wessex Poems, “The Impercipient,” also illustrates Hardy's modernity in its use of the negative, in this case not “No” but the prefix “im-,” to present a diminution of consciousness. The word impercipient, which means lacking perception, implies the loss of a faculty that makes us human. What the speaker as “a gazer” cannot perceive in the fourth stanza is the sound that an “inland company” thinks it hears, that of a “‘glorious distant sea’” (CPW, I, p. 88). The gazer hears instead only the wind in the trees. The poem specifically rejects the consolation that Wordsworth's speaker experiences in the ninth stanza of the “Immortality Ode.” In that stanza, though “inland far,” the speaker has “sight” of an “immortal sea” and can “hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.” That sight and that sound are ones that, because they are unavailable, can provide no comfort and no consolation to Thomas Hardy's impercipient poetic speakers.

The radically ambiguous effects, refusal of consolation, and negativity persist in ways that respond to Romantic poets besides Wordsworth. “During Wind and Rain,” published in Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917), owes a clear debt to Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind.” Harold Bloom even calls Hardy's poem “a grandchild” of Shelley's.³ In saying that, however, Bloom claims not just that wind, rain, leaves, and storm are important in both poems but that Hardy is a late-Romantic poet who follows Shelley thematically and not just chronologically. That is not the case. Shelley's poem is formally elegant, with long lines of verse arranged into five numbered parts that combine the Shakespearean sonnet with an English version of terza rima in imitation of Dante. Hardy's poem is a ballad, a popular form as far from Dante and Shakespearean sonnets as Hardy is from Shelley. The difference is apparent in the poems' contrasting diction. In Shelley, “the leaves dead / Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.” In Hardy, “the sick leaves reel down in throngs!” (CPW, II, p. 239). “Reel” suggests going round in a whirling motion, but, in the context of singing and the playing of music referred to earlier in the same stanza, “reel” can also call to mind the Scottish dance. In this poem, which concerns change and death, the dance is a danse macabre or dance of death in which all participate. Shelley's poem projects instead a cyclical process that renews life, as the closing optimistically asserts: “O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

Shelley's closing apostrophe to the wind differs from Hardy's use of apostrophe. Both apostrophe and personification can suggest that a human speaker and humanized nature are mutually supportive. Hardy regularly avoids that suggestion. Shelley's poem begins and ends with an apostrophic invocation to the wind, addressed as “O wild West Wind” in the first line. Several times in the poem, at the end of a line Shelley's speaker invokes the wind as “O thou” or enjoins it to listen with “oh, hear!” Hardy mimics but transforms Shelley's use of apostrophe at line-ends in two of his stanzas by closing the ballad-like refrain at the sixth line with the “O” of an apparent apostrophe: “the years O!” (lines 6, 20). But this “O” is the sound of the voice sighing, a sign of loss rather than an indication of full-throated lyric address. Hardy does not begin and end his poem in a Shelleyan way with apostrophes to an aspect of nature that appears to stand for the imagination. Instead, he literalizes the wind by making it part of the natural context in which the poem's events and his presentation of those events occur. T. S. Eliot does something similar in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” published in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) the same year as Moments of Vision.

This literalizing of Romantic figures, like the use of cow in “Nature's Questioning,” creates a revisionary distance between the later poem and the earlier Romantic one. Hardy's “O” at the end of a line rhymes internally with “Ah, no” from earlier in the line and expresses a response to “the years.” That is, instead of addressing “the years” as human by saying “O Years,” Hardy links “O” internally with “no” and with time's passage. In the alternative versions of the refrain, “the years O” becomes “the years, the years” (lines 13, 27) in a repetition that explains what “O” means. Rather than inspiring a prophetic response, which Shelley requests of the wind, the years, along with the wind and the rain, define the context, time, and the weather, in which life proceeds to its inevitable end.

At the end of Shelley's poem, the speaker asks that the wind carry a trumpeting prophecy through his lips to an “unawakened earth,” presumably in order to wake it up. The west wind and the poet's breath would fuse in poetic singing. In this projected mutuality of voice, Shelley has sung to and for the wind, which he asks now to sing through him. There is singing in “During Wind and Rain,” at the beginning, but it is singing by “He, she, all of them” (line 2), apparently real people in a domestic scene, not by a poet intent on prophecy. The domestication of song works in tandem with the literalizing of wind. At the end of Hardy's poem, instead of the promise of prophetic song, we hear that “Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs” (line 28). The scene has become a cemetery in the rain, with drops running down the names of those who once sang. The rain has become a tear that responds to the fact that those who lie in the earth cannot be awakened.

The tear of rain indicates more than lamentation about a loss, for it is figuratively engaged in the agricultural work of ploughing, which is related to carving as an act of marking a surface through human labor. Unlike Shelley, Hardy focuses in his poem's ending not on imaginative wind and prophetic singing but on the human labor of carving, ploughing, and, by extension, writing as work that remembers what once was but has now passed. The response to Shelley involves centrally a corrective gesture in which the “O” of apostrophe is negated, opposed, and written over by the “Ah, no” repeated in all four stanzas in the lines of refrain. Instead of emphasizing a wind that is always there to inspire poetic singing, Hardy stresses time's passage and the changes that compose human history. Rather than imitating the Romantic precursors to whom he responds, Hardy expresses distinctive attitudes. The poetic future that “During Wind and Rain” anticipates and enables includes Seamus Heaney's “Digging,” in which the poet chooses to dig with his pen. For Heaney, as for Hardy, writing resembles working with the earth or with stone, not Shelley's prophetic, wind-inspired trumpeting.

WAR POEMS AND OTHER SELF-REFLECTIVE DOUBLINGS

Hardy shares with later modernist poets an experience that their nineteenth-century precursors never had, that of modern warfare, with its attendant social and psychological effects. But Hardy's concern with matters of war begins during the nineteenth century in his lifelong interest in the Napoleonic conflicts. The primary literary result of this interest is The Dynasts, subtitled “An Epic-Drama of the war with Napoleon, in three parts, nineteen acts, & one hundred & thirty scenes, the time covered by the action being about ten years.” The three parts appeared in 1903, 1906, and 1908. In an important, though brief, commentary on this immense work, Isobel Armstrong asserts that The Dynasts is both the culmination of a politically resistant nineteenth-century poetic tradition and a new beginning for poetry as modernist experimentation.⁴ The work's multiple perspectives and styles and its combining of heroic and democratic forms justify Armstrong's claims for its originality and significance. Hardy's double, antithetical vision of Wellington and Napoleon as versions of each other provides an emphatic, historically focused instance of the tensions and contradictions evident as well in his shorter poems written in response to contemporary wars.

Hardy responded to modern war in two groups of short poems. The first, written about and during the Boer War (1899-1902), appear as eleven “War Poems” in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Hardy's second volume of poetry. The best-known of these is “Drummer Hodge,” a poem that exhibits Hardy's withering irony about the pretensions of Imperial Britain in its colonial excursions as they affect the lower classes. The class-inflected character of Hardy's modernism is evident in this antijingoistic poem. Hodge, whose name evokes British agricultural laborers, provides an example of how England is able to carry its imperial burden only at great cost to its uneducated, laboring class. Instead of helping successfully to transform the non-British world into Britain's own image, Hodge becomes fertilizer for foreign plants. Not Britannia but “strange-eyed constellations” (CPW, I, p. 122) rule Hodge's stars. Stylistically, the poem is distinctive because Hardy extends his tendency to mix styles by including phrases of Afrikaans dialect. The infiltration of this strange language, as in the word kopje-crest, meaning hillcrest, into a poem about a simple British soldier, enacts in the style a reversal of British expectations. Another poem in this group, “Song of the Soldiers' Wives and Sweethearts” (CPW, I, pp. 128-29), is an early example of Hardy's adopting a female voice. As does Yeats in his Crazy Jane poems, he chooses a persona so distant from himself that it amounts to what Yeats called an anti-self.

The later group of seventeen war poems, written shortly before or during WWI, appears as “Poems of War and Patriotism” in Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917). The widely admired “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’” (CPW, II, pp. 295-96) is less about war than it is about all that is not war. In this regard, the most memorable of these poems evoke opposites that are mutually defining. “In Time” includes numerous references that in another text could suggest violence and war primarily, but here they do so only indirectly as if by echo. Because of the diction, the perspective is resolutely double. We hear of “harrowing” (as in the harrowing of hell at the last judgment), “stalking,” “smoke,” “flame,” and death. The harrowing is predicated not of the world's end but of the earth during ploughing. The stalking refers not to the deadly activity of soldiers or even hunters but to the cultivating of soil. The smoke is that of a grassfire “without flame.” And the death refers figuratively to the unlikely disappearance of a story that will outlast tales of war. Rather than writing about war, Hardy has set about righting our sense of war's importance by transferring its vocabulary to another, preferable context.

The first poem in the sequence, “‘Men Who March Away’” (CPW, II, pp. 289-90), also includes a doubled perspective, that of the soldiers who sing and that of the silent, doubting observer whom they address. But the poem's effect is to suggest that the double perspective is actually that of the soldiers, who are ambivalent and doubtful about their own endeavor. Hardy cunningly communicates the poem's ambivalence by means of rhymes. The two most frequent rhyme words, “away” and “us,” used in the first stanza, are taken up later in the poem. Those who are marching “away” are heard emphatically to say “Nay” at the opening of two lines (lines 15, 20). These nay-sayers who present themselves as so positive about their own enterprise emphasize their solidarity by saying “us” repeatedly. “Us” comes back, however, as part of the “musing eye” (line 9; italics added here and below) of the observer who is their apparent opposite but actually part of themselves. It returns when they assert in words linked by rhyme to each other and to “us” that they are the “just” because of whom “braggarts must” “bite the dust.” Rather than distinguishing “us” from them, who are the skeptics and the enemy, “us” creates a connection to the musers and to those who bite the dust, who may well be “us.”

Doubling and self-reflection begin early in Hardy's poetry-writing independently of his war poems in texts such as “Wessex Heights,” written in the 1890s but published in Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914). The emphasis in “Wessex Heights” on the speaker's present self in uneasy relation to a past self is replicated by the parenthetical date (1896) forming part of the title of a poem published in a volume almost twenty years later. The poem's self-observing element is embodied stylistically in radically ambiguous phrasing that prevents us from separating into two distinct parts something simultaneously doubled and singular:

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause
Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

(CPW, II, p. 26)

The speaker appears at first to see himself as in the past false to the self he is now, but the phrasing suggests that he was also being false to himself then, in an act of self-betrayal that is internally divisive. The “I” sees “him watching,” that is, engaging in a related activity of looking, apparently looking at the “I” who is his continuator. The reciprocal activity is like the gazing of the speaker at nature and nature's gazing back at the speaker in “Nature's Questioning.” Both the “I” and his previous self are “wondering” in a mutually reflective way. Mutuality and persistence, as well as the difference, between him and me emerge in the pronoun references when third person and first person are set in apposition as “himself” and “my chrysalis.” The questions raised by this language concerning the continuity or discontinuity between the poet and his earlier self challenge the assertions of continuity in the poet's life found in Wordsworth's poetry, as in the lines from “My Heart Leaps Up” that form the epigraph for the “Immortality Ode.”

A related crossing-over or self-regarding doubling occurs in the last of the “Poems of War and Patriotism,” “I Looked Up From My Writing.” This poem of observation and self-observation expresses skepticism about the speaker's own writing because of the possibility, as in “Wessex Heights,” that he has been false to himself. The later poem again involves looking at something that looks back in a way that enables a recognition:

I looked up from my writing,
                    And gave a start to see,
As if rapt in my inditing,
                    The moon's full gaze on me.

(CPW, II, p. 305)

By means of a pun, itself a form of doubling, the phrase “rapt in my inditing” links the writer and the moon while setting the two in violent opposition. Both are “rapt” or deeply engrossed in the poet's “inditing,” or writing, but the Indo-European root that gives rise to “rapt” means “to seize,” and it stands behind various words with violent implications, such as rapacious. The violent element is confirmed when we hear “indicting” as a pun on “inditing.” The writer may be indicting something in his writing, but the moon is definitely looking at the poet in an accusatory way, as if indicting him for a crime. In doing that, the personified moon proceeds as if reading a poem, first “scanning” the landscape in search of a man who has “put his life-light out,” that is, committed suicide, because his son has been slain in war.

To scan means to look out over something, such as a scene, but also to analyze the metrical pattern of verse. The moon's scanning leads her “to look / Into the blinkered mind” of someone who would write anything in a world in which children are slain and parents commit suicide. “Look into” suggests a physical act of perception, but it also means “investigate,” as one would a crime. What she investigates is the crime of being “blinkered,” or blinded. In an undoing of personification's usual implications, the moon presents itself as different from the human, since what she sees is that this particular human being cannot see; he is impercipient. The blinded mind of the poet, like the blinded bird in Hardy's contemporaneous poem of that title, is dead in life. The moon's “temper,” her mood or her anger, has, by the final stanza, “overwrought” him. Wrought, the past participle of work, is related to the word wright, someone who makes, such as a playwright or, by extension, a poet. He has become overwrought, or anxious, because of the moon's looks, but she has also overwritten him. The poet ceases to speak under the pressure of having been written over, when he realizes he must “shun her view,” not look at her and not be looked at by her, because she thinks he “should,” either ought to or will, “drown him too” (line 24). To be “rapt in his inditing” now means that the poet is wrapped in his own writing, like a corpse in a winding-sheet of his own creating, a winding sheet that is his own indictment.

ANTI-ELEGIAC ELEGIES

The refusal in “I Looked Up From My Writing” to hide from the possibility of his own complicity in the violent, unjust process of war finds its counterpart in the sometimes withering honesty and refusal of easy consolation in Hardy's elegies. Those elegies, or poems of mourning in response to a loss, are regularly anti-elegiac. They swerve as clearly as do the war poems from identifying anything as an unalloyed basis for celebration or satisfaction. They recognize that loss is irreversible. Rather than compensating for the loss or finding satisfaction in what remains behind or in the act of writing, Hardy's modern elegies express the dimensions of the loss in surprising, unconventional ways. As in “During Wind and Rain,” those who have departed cannot be called back, but they can be recalled in an act of poetic work that, like ploughing their names with tears, honors them by reinscribing the carved names on headstones or recognizing the ambivalent meaning of flowers growing on a grave. In the process of writing his many powerfully moving elegies, Hardy rewrites the elegiac tradition by shunning one of its frequent features, the suggestion that the dead survive in some form, especially as speaking subjects or as spirits inhabiting a landscape. There can even be a grimly jocular element in the elegies, comparable to Eliot's humor about death in “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” where the birds defecate on Agamemnon's shroud, as presumably they will on Sweeney's.

Hardy's most widely admired elegies are the twenty-one poems comprising “Poems of 1912-13,” written after the death of his wife, Emma, from whom he had been emotionally estranged for many years. Among the most arresting of the numerous elegies that Hardy wrote later are “The Figure in the Scene,” “He Prefers Her Earthly,” “The Shadow on the Stone,” and the self-elegy, “Afterwards,” in Moments of Vision (1917). These poems include a resolute refusal to accept a deluded consolation, even though at times the speaker expresses the wish that the happiness of an earlier time could be recovered. Part of what prevents that recovery is the speaker's recognition, shared with us, that there has been a double loss. In effect, the person who died was already dead to the speaker in life because of an emotional estrangement. To return the person to life is not sufficient, because doing that does not overcome the distance that separated the speaker from her even during life. The impossibility of the double recovery prevents consolation.

The comparatively brief, deceptively simple “Rain on a Grave” from “Poems of 1912-13” provides a vivid example of Hardy's revision of the elegiac tradition. The poem has been read as the beginning of recovery and consolation for the speaker that is traditional in elegiac poetry.⁵ In that reading, rain, as a sign of the tears that come with mourning, contributes to the vegetative cycle of growth and flowering that are frequent features of elegies. In fact, Hardy calls up those conventional elements, but he does so to transform and even transmogrify them by means of sexual implications. The rain appears to be not mournful but vengeful, in response to the dead woman's avoidance of water during life:

Clouds spout upon her
                    Their waters amain
                    In ruthless disdain,—
Her who but lately
                    Had shivered with pain
As at touch of dishonour
If there had lit on her
So coldly, so straightly
                    Such arrows of rain.

(CPW, II, p. 50)

Even without the context of Hardy's estranged relations with his dead wife, the erotic implications are evident. The diction suggests that the woman felt dishonor at being touched. This reading is especially likely because of the pun in “arrows of rain,” which sounds like “eros” of rain and evokes the penetrating of her body. Poems of a traditionally elegiac sort do not mix sexual implications and a vengeful attitude in their evocation of loss and possible consolation.

The sexual implications continue when we learn in the closing stanza that “[g]reen blades” of grass will soon grow “from her mound,” both her new grave and her mons veneris or female pubic mound, which becomes covered with hair during puberty. As did the arrows earlier, the blades indicate a violent aspect in nature rather than primarily a gentle, consoling one. The double meaning of “mound” suggests incongruously that in death the woman reaches sexual maturity. The stanza goes on to imply that through the body's decay, she will become part of the daisies on her grave and even “the sweet heart of them.” She is their sweetheart, but, as decomposed matter, she also becomes their heart or central element physically. If we read “them” with emphasis, she has finally become a sweetheart, but to them, not to the speaker, her former sweetheart.

In the poem's middle, the speaker implies that during “the prime of the year” they strayed together as lovers on sunny days and clear evenings. But this was, by implication, during the “prime” of their lives, which is long past. The rain that now falls on her grave began not at her death but much earlier. The recovery of that sunny time, the reversal of the double loss that occurred first through disaffection and then through death, is more than the poem can accomplish. Even the assertion in the final line that “All her life's round” suggests a circularity in her existence and death that is less than consoling. She has become part of the natural round of vegetative death and growth, but she is no closer to an adult human love than she was in life.

Hardy's denial of deluded consolation to the speaker in his elegies often emerges in his use of negative language that appears at times as a kind of ghost or echo of what is ostensibly being said. This generating of overtones from negative statements, related to the multiple meanings in other poems mentioned earlier, is particularly clear in “After A Journey,” one of the most ambitious and subtle of “Poems of 1912-13,” and in the slightly later “The Figure in the Scene.” Both include an implied but emphatic denial that anything remains of the person that can be portrayed as positive or present. The negativity of these poems anticipates its prominent place in Hardy's late poetry. By means of negative language suggesting absence, Hardy makes possible in surprising and vivid ways the recognition of a rich multiplicity of meanings while countering the speaker's delusions. The multiplicity, which can neither reverse the loss nor compensate for it, inhabits and expresses loss in an unusual poetic style that refuses the limits of conventional evocations of grief and relief.

“After a Journey” is a poem about repetitions with a difference, both repetitions that create something new and ones that cannot recapture a lost original. As we learn in the first line, the goal of the speaker's journey has been “to view a voiceless ghost” (CPW, II, p. 59). At the poem's end, the speaker asks to be brought “here again” in closing lines asserting that he is “just the same as when / Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.” In light of the poem's directions and its recurring negatives, the assertion is more a protest at the inability to achieve an unvarying, changeless repetition than a convincing statement about a satisfying visit that can be repeated.

Although much of the poem is addressed to “you,” it begins with a monologue that never turns convincingly into a dialogue with the “voiceless ghost.” This ghost without a voice is the poet's dead lover, his muse, and a version of Echo, the mythological figure most closely associated with lyric poetry's repetitive language. Representations of echo occur throughout the poem by means of internal rhymes and end rhymes. The first instance of perfect rhyming in the end rhymes, “draw me” and “awe me” (lines 2, 4), provides the kind of echoing that the mythological figure of Echo practiced. That is, the later sounds are contained wholly within the former words, which have been foreshortened. In addition, every stanza includes lines in which exact or foreshortened repetitions constitute internal rhymes: “Whither, O whither” (line 2), “Through the …, through the” (line 10), “At the then fair … in the then fair” (line 20), and “bringing me here; nay, bring me here” (line 30).

The clearest evocation of echo occurs in the second half of the third stanza, when we learn that “you are leading me on” (line 17) to places known long ago, a waterfall and its cave, “with a voice still so hollow / That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago” (lines 21-22). The language suggests both that the cave, a place of echoes, still has a hollow voice and that the addressee, “you,” has such a voice. But the voice, whether of the place or the “voiceless ghost,” only “seems” to speak. The ghost's apparent speech in the second stanza is merely what the speaker thinks it might have found to say, embedded in questions about what it would say if it could: “Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division? / Things were not lastly as firstly well / With us twain, you tell?” (lines 13-15). The illusion of the ghost's speaking occurs because the interrogative “you tell?” suggests that the speaker is responding to what the ghost has actually said.

The language's double effect resembles the dual character of an echo. An overtone gives the apparently literal language another meaning. This conceptual doubling, which occurs frequently in Hardy's poetry, also informs the phrase “leading me on.” The ghost leads the speaker physically to spots they knew, but the act of this seeming voice amounts to leading him on in a figurative sense toward hopes that cannot be fulfilled. The speaker desires something that will be denied because the voice is not real.

The doubt, hesitation, and denial are evoked in the first internal repetitions, “Whither, O whither,” in the final ones, “bringing me here; nay, bring me here,” and between them. The “O” of apostrophe, which normally projects life, a voice, and a face onto something inanimate, is called up as an unactualized potential, since there is no direct address in the poem's opening. As part of a series of negatives that occur in every stanza, the “nay” (line 30) of the final stanza indicates that the speaker's wish will be denied. That denial has been predicted in the first stanza in the address to the “you” whose “coming and going” (line 8) is the fading in and out of an echo.

In that initial address, the speaker asserts that “Where you will next be there's no knowing” (line 5). Like “leading me on,” this statement has overtones that enable us to recognize that the “voiceless ghost” speaks or is addressed in the context of qualifying negations and an emptying out of the illusory presence. With the phrase “no knowing,” the first negation in the poem, the speaker indicates that he cannot predict where the ghost will be next. The same language, however, tells us what the place is. The place of “no knowing,” where consciousness, our faculty for knowing, does not function, is death. Further, “no knowing” understood as echoic language tells us what the character of that place will be. It is a place, like the one figuratively created by the poem, in which a voiceless, echo-like sound occurs as the exact repetition of sound in “no knowing.” The ghost will be “no-noing,” that is, saying, in an echoic voice of denial, “no, no.” Denial may also have been the ghost's habit during life. The poem both emerges from and tends toward this “no-noing,” the undoing of apostrophe through a negation that turns “O” into the “no,” “not,” and “nay” of each stanza. The “O” that leads the speaker on in the third stanza, manifested by “mistbow shone,” “so hollow,” “ago,” “aglow,” and “follow,” in an insistent sequence of repetitions, leads in this poem's implications ultimately to the place of “no knowing,” not to a place of consolation.

Hardy plays on “no” and “know” in an equally memorable but more condensed way in the final lines of “The Figure in the Scene,” which exemplify his firm refusal of the consolations that elegies frequently offer:

Yet her rainy form is the Genius still of the spot,
                    Immutable, yea,
Though the place now knows her no more, and has known her not
                    Ever since that day.

(CPW, II, p. 217)

The day in question is one in which the speaker sketched his female companion during rain that left “blots engrained” on the sketch. The poem's closing has sometimes been misread to mean, in a conventionally elegiac way, that the woman has become a genius loci or permanent, undying spirit of the place or spot.⁶ But by “spot” Hardy means not only or primarily the place but the “blots” on the paper. By “still” he suggests not only or primarily her continuing presence but her stillness in death. By “Immutable” he indicates not that she is undying but that the spots of which she is the “Genius” or inspiration cannot be removed, any more than the effects of death can be reversed by elegiac poetry. What the place “knows” “more” “now” is her “no,” the negation that she insistently represents. What it “has known” since the day she left is “her not.” Hardy's refusal of elegy's potential delusions in “The Figure in the Scene” rejects resolutely and absolutely elements central to nineteenth-century conventions of elegiac poetry.

LATE POEMS: THE ANTI-SELF, NEGATIVITY, AND BECKETIAN LANGUAGE

The poems that Hardy published or prepared for publication during the last decade of his life are too numerous and heterogenous to enable comprehensive description. Many of them do, however, continue and elaborate elements we have already seen, including doubled perspectives and negative language. The doubling at times proliferates into multiple views and at times attains the status of an anti-self, while the negative language resists delusions and refuses conventional expectations.

The multiplying of views or selves is reminiscent of what D. H. Lawrence called the allotropic form of his fictional characters, their tendency to change state, as carbon does from coal to diamond. In “So Various,” from his last volume, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928), Hardy presents in thirteen five-line stanzas thirteen versions of himself, twelve versions as apparently distinct individuals and a thirteenth that encompasses them all:

Now … All these specimens of man,
So various in their pith and plan,
                    Curious to say
                    Were one man. Yea,
                    I was all they.

(CPW, III, p. 208, lines 61-65)

As Yeats says, the artist “will play with all masks.”⁷ The multiple views of reality recall Wallace Stevens's “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” except that Hardy's subject and object are himself. The stanzaic form, with two longer lines that rhyme followed by three shorter lines that rhyme, suggests an internal division or a combination of opposites, in a way that resembles Hardy's formal reflection of doubling, or being twain, in earlier poems, including “The Convergence of the Twain.”

The combination of opposites and multiplying of selves and voices occurs as well in “Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard” (CPW, II, pp. 395-97), from Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), but with an emphasis on echoic language and mortality that include the poetic speaker and the reader. In the final stanza, the dead who have spoken breathe as “maskers” (line 49) to those who linger, both the speaker and the reader. As “maskers,” they are dancers in the dance of death, in which all participate, and they are personae, or masks, that a poetic speaker wears. Their “lively speech” (line 51), the language of the dead, is “murmurous” (line 53), or echoic, as in the rhymes of the refrain, “cheerily” and “eerily,” which define the world's dual but conjoined character as night and day.

To learn from the dead and to take on their murmurous, echoic language as one's own refrain, as the speaker does in the final stanza of “Voices,” is to become an anti-self, image, or mask in the sense that Yeats means those terms when he uses them in his autobiographical writings and elsewhere. For Yeats, to grasp one's anti-self is to achieve “the state of mind, which is of all states of mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation” (Yeats, Autobiography, p. 132). It is the moment at which the poet becomes “the opposite” of all that the poet is in “daily life” (p. 184). This moment, in which a form of freedom is attained, is part of poetic creation for Yeats, when he wears various masks, including that of “a mad old woman” on the Dublin quays (p. 359). Hardy evokes and achieves this state of being his own opposite in his late poetry when he adopts the voices of the dead.

Like Yeats, Hardy achieves the anti-self by taking on the voice of a woman who, as does Yeats's Crazy Jane, speaks independently of and against her male antagonists. In becoming the dead woman who speaks, Hardy anticipates poems by Seamus Heaney, including “Bog Queen” and “Punishment.” In “Not Only I,” from Human Shows: Far Phantasies: Songs, and Trifles (1925), by taking on the mask of a dead woman Hardy's speaker expresses a multiple status in which the male poet becomes a she who is both “I” and “‘Not only I.’” She says that “Not only I / Am doomed awhile to lie” (CPW, III, p. 101) in the grave because she has with her a multitude of attitudes, thoughts, and memories that are not quite “I” in any determinate sense. But her statement means as well that she is not the only one destined for the grave, since all of us die and “lie” in both senses of lying. She differs from those who remain behind, for her lying includes the poetic swerving from literal truth that makes the poem's words those of a woman who speaks from the grave. The poem achieves an ostensibly impossible feat, for the dead speaker expresses what those who have outlived her think: “‘Here moulders till Doom's-dawn / A Woman's skeleton’” (lines 29-30). In defiance of this reductive view the poem's rhetoric asserts the persistence and the importance of all that is “[s]trange” and “unrecorded,” “[l]ost” and “disregarded,” by recording, preserving, regarding, and preferring its strangeness.

Equally strange are the poems in which the speaker's voice or one of the speaker's voices falls silent. This occurs in “Surview,” the closing poem of Late Lyrics and Earlier, when the speaker recounts how his “own voice,” whose language is printed in italics, talked to him in an accusatory way until “my voice ceased talking to me” (CPW, II, p. 485). The situation recalls both “Wessex Heights” and “I Looked Up From My Writing.” The poem that follows from and memorializes speech's cessation within the divided self evokes the uncanny, echoic effect of a falling silent resulting in a poetic speaking that continues the now silent voice by respeaking its words. This falling silent that we learn of through the strange continuation of its textual reflection and result anticipates the self-correcting, contradictory style and the tendencies toward silence in the much later work of Samuel Beckett.

Hardy achieves a culminating paradoxical effect in the closing poem of his oeuvre, “He Resolves To Say No More.” Because of the formal resemblance of its five-line stanza to “So Various,” this concluding poem extends the earlier one while also bringing it to closure. The poet who was so various now enjoins his soul in an apostrophe to be silent: “O my soul, keep the rest unknown!” (CPW, III, p. 274). He will not reveal the remainder, but he also refuses to know what rest is; his grave will be unquiet. By asserting that he chooses silence, the poet speaks as though he could control what he apparently could not earlier in “Surview,” his voice's ceasing to speak to him, and what he absolutely cannot control as he faces death, the loss of speech. Hardy's use of apostrophe to enjoin silence boldly transforms a trope that traditionally implies the ability to speak. Hardy also links the affirmative “Yea” with “none” at the end of the first stanza, and thereafter negative statements reiterate that “What I have learnt no man shall know.”

By shifting from “O” to “no” and to “know” Hardy achieves a final reversal of apostrophe's usual effects in a way that enables us to understand the poem's title, in the manner of Beckett's late style, as both so various and a falling silent. As Beckett writes in Worstward Ho, “Enough to know no knowing … No saying. No saying what it all is they somehow say.”⁸ Hardy reaches the place of “no knowing” and no-noing from “After a Journey,” where we know he always will next be. While he ostensibly chooses and accomplishes his fate, the silence of death, which he cannot avoid, he tells us in absolute terms that (like Joyce's Stephen Dedalus) he refuses to serve. Hardy resolves not only to say nothing but to say “no” more, to resist conforming even more frequently and more strenuously than before. He responds to pressures of society and mortality with a resisting, exclamatory statement, “no more,” insisting that the pressures must stop. Through its multiple meanings, his style enjoins and enables us to know more when by attending to this poet's no-noing, in which he manages both to fall silent and continue, we become the strange continuators of his still but still stirring, echoing voice.

Notes

1. The classic discussion of the difficulty in defining Romanticism is Arthur O. Lovejoy's “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” (PMLA, 29 [1924], 229-53), rpt. in his Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948), pp. 228-53.

2. A prominent instance of amphiboly in a modernist poem is Yeats's use of “from” in the final line of “Among School Children.” In the second episode of Ulysses, Joyce uses subjective and objective genitive, and identifies it grammatically as such, in the phrase “Amor matris,” meaning both the child's love for the mother and the mother's love for the child.

3. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 21.

4. See the “Postscript” to Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 479-89.

5. See the interpretive headnote to “Rain on a Grave” by Tim Armstrong, ed., Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (London and New York: Longman, 1993), p. 157.

6. This is the reading that Jahan Ramazani holds to in Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 62-63.

7. W. B. Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York: Collier, 1965), p. 318.

8. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1983), p. 30.

Further Reading

Bailey, J. O. The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970.

Bayley, John. An Essay on Hardy. London: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Brodsky, Joseph. “Wooing the Inanimate: Four Poems by Thomas Hardy.” On Grief and Reason: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995, pp. 312-75.

Buckler, W. E. The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Study in Art and Ideas. New York: New York University Press, 1983.

Christ, Carol T. Victorian and Modern Poetics. University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Clements, Patricia and Juliet Grindle, eds. The Poetry of Thomas Hardy. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1980.

Davie, Donald. Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Hynes, Samuel. The Pattern of Hardy's Poetry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1961.

Larkin, Philip. Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955-1982. London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1983.

Lucas, John. Modern English Poetry from Hardy to Hughes: A Critical Survey. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1986.

Mahar, Margaret. “Hardy's Poetry of Renunciation.” ELH, 45 (1978), 303-24.

Marsden, Kenneth. The Poems of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Miller, J. Hillis. The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens. Princeton University Press, 1985.

Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991.

Morgan, William W. “Form, Tradition, and Consolation in Hardy's ‘Poems of 1912-13.’” PMLA, 89 (1974), 496-505.

Murfin, Ross. Swinburne, Hardy, Lawrence, and the Burden of Belief. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

“Moments of Vision: Hardy's ‘Poems of 1912-13.’” Victorian Poetry, 20 (1982), 73-84.

Orel, Harold, ed. Critical Essays on Thomas Hardy's Poetry. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995.

Paulin, Tom. Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975.

Pinion, F. B. A Commentary on the Poems of Thomas Hardy. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976.

Sacks, Peter. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

Taylor, Dennis. Hardy's Poetry, 1860-1928. New York: Columbia University Press; London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981. 2nd edn., Macmillan, 1989.

Zeitlow, Paul. Moments of Vision: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974.