What is your critical appreciation of Thomas Hardy's poem "The Harbour Bridge"?
Possessing a keen interest in architecture, Thomas Hardy combines this interest with a melancholy vision of life in the imaginative art form of poetry. "The Harbour Bridge" is in a metrical form of several stanzas common in Anglican hymns as it mimicks Prior's Eighty-Eighth Psalm. There is, in Hardy's poem, the blending of personal meditation and philosophical discourse with the presence of the "Hardyesque" themes of an inexorable, but neutral life force named "Immanent Will" that has man acting out its dictates.
The poet contemplates the structure of the bridge as the controlling metaphor for the forces of life. Life is acted out on this bridge as painters, the dreamy-eyed girl, the "practical woman" who traverse the structure, and finally the sailor and his wife who meet upon it are observed; however, this portrait of a microcosm of life turns to the contemplative. For, there on the bridge is the dissolution of a marriage, and what one critic...
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calls Hardy's depiction of
...humans' efforts to achieve love and dignity and significance [that] simply create “satires of circumstance.”
The wife becomes what for Hardy is "time's laughing-stock" as the sailor tells her that her efforts to save their marriage are too late:
"I can't give up the other woman now;
You should have talked like that in former days,
When I was last home.”
Thus, with some mimicking and variation of the sonnet form with rhyming couplets throughout, and certainly a mimicking of the hymn of Prior, Hardy's frequent theme of the loss of a center to meaning is illustrated in this melancholy poem with typically vivid imagery as despite the light, the wife's life that has lost its moorings from her mistakes in human communication is put into darkness:
And soon above, like lamps more opaline,
White stars ghost forth, that care not for men's wives,
Or any other lives.
Other color imagery foreshadows the tragic ending of the poem as black repeats itself as the bridge is "hanging dark/Against the day's end sky...." and the painters of the bridge
As cut black-paper portraits hastening on
In conversation none knows what upon:
Their sharp-edged lips move quickly word by word
help to shade the dark tone of this poem.
What are the major themes in Thomas Hardy's poem "The Harbour Bridge"?
Thomas Hardy's poem "The Harbour Bridge" takes the death of a relationship as its theme. The first quarter of the poem describes the bridge itself, but Hardy's words hint at the ominous outcome of the relationship between the sailor and his wife. Twice in the first eight lines of the poem, Hardy tells his audience that the sun is setting, foreshadowing the end of the relationship. The bridge itself is "dark" and Hardy notes the bridge's "skeleton." Strands of rope are also described as "black as char" (i.e., black as charcoal). All of this darkness leads the audience not to expect that things will turn out well in this poem.
In lines 9 and 12, we find references to "shade" and "black-paper", which again hint at the death of the relationship that we will hear about in the last 16 lines of the poem. At last, in line 19, we meet the sailor and his wife. We note that they "are keeping apart" (line 20), an indicator that they are not in love. In lines 23-34, the wife invites her husband to come back home and reminds him of the comfortable life he has there.
At lines 25-28, the sailor-husband answers that he cannot come home. He has found another woman, whom he cannot leave. He tells his wife that she "should have talked like that in former days" (27).
The poem ends with the husband and wife going their separate ways and any further traces of daylight fading into a darkness illuminated by street lamps and the stars "that care not for men's wives" (31).
Wow! This is one of the saddest poems I think I have ever encountered. Hardy's first wife died in 1912 and he remarried two years later. "The Harbour Bridge" was part of a collection published in 1925. Perhaps Hardy's own experience with two wives informed this poem to some extent.