Collaborative Selection of Hardy's Poetry


My hope is that this page will start a conversation about putting together the best possible selection of Hardy's poetry, a list that one could recommend to someone who has never read the poems.  Ideally, it would demonstrate the wide range of virtues in the poetry -- metrical, melodic, thematic, ethical and emotive -- and in that way give newcomers a sense of quite how valuable time spent with Hardy's poetry can be.

I would like to suggest working by way of smaller lists.  Each list would focus on a specific aspect of Hardy's craft, and each list would consist of between five and ten poems accompanied by a brief description of why each poem matters.

Please send
(1) suggestions for ways to focus these smaller lists and
(2) your own choice of poems in response to the selection that follows
to my email address.  



"I think that to transfuse emotion . . . is the peculiar function of poetry."  Following this formula of A.E. Housman, I want to start by identifying a set of Hardy's poems that have a consistent and profound emotional charge for me.  A little later in his Cambridge lecture of May 1933 (published that year as The Name and Nature of Poetry), Housman says:

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.  This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats's last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, 'everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.'

Here are five poems of Thomas Hardy that consistently send a shiver down my spine.  As always, numbers refer to Gibson's edition:

The Going (277)

The first of two poems here from the Poems of 1912-13, the series that grew from the death of Hardy's first wife Emma.  Under the epigraph Veteris vestigia flammae ("Traces of an old flame"), taken from the mouth of passion-struck Dido in Vergil's Aeneid, Hardy sets the ashes of his marriage and the present 'blankness' of his surroundings against the recollection of the relationship's early fire.  "The Going" opens the sequence with the propulsive line "Why did you give no hint that night . . .", a driving rhythm later picked up in the picture of Emma's youth in Cornwall:  "You were the swan-necked one who rode / Along the beetling Beeny Crest . . ."  Angry remonstrance alternates throughout the poem with the inertia of grief -- "Till in darkening dankness / The yawning blankness / Of the perspective sickens me!" -- until in the last stanza the monosyllabic resignation of "It must go" crashes against the final shout of misery:  "O you could not know / That such swift fleeing / No soul foreseeing -- / Not even I -- would undo me so!" Such 'undoing' pulls against the contrary act of stitching together -- an act that enables the production of this taut poem -- to powerful effect.


At Castle Boterel (292)

This second piece from the Poems of 1912-13 elaborates another vivid scene of the poet engaged with the past, here as he visits the Cornish landscape visualized in "The Going."  Some years ago I took part in an event at the University of Southern California in which students, faculty and staff read and commented upon a favorite poem.  Here is what I said that day in Los Angeles.


During Wind and Rain (441)

Hardy's command of images is evident in this extraordinary poem, along with his manipulation of a tightly controlled narrative and poetic structure.  As Dennis Taylor points out (Hardy's Poetry 1860-1928, pp. 31-3) the poem places the poet's reminiscence of the progression of familial life -- communal song, work in the garden, a summer breakfast, moving house -- against his experience of the progression of a storm in a graveyard; the two scenes coalesce in the devastating final line "Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs."  Regular variation of rhyme-words ("yea" at the end of the second line in stanzas 1 and 3, "aye" in 2 and 4) and recurrent phrases ("Ah, no; the years O!" alternating with "Ah, no; the years, the years") tie together the strands of each time period as the stanzas progress and give the poem an incantatory hold on the reader's memory.
The poem has two of Hardy's greatest poetic visions:  the contrast between the "pet fowl" attending the breakfasters and the "white storm-birds" in the scene of the cemetery, and the "brightest things that are theirs" arrayed on the lawn as the family moves house.  These function as what Tom Paulin calls "visionary objects":
"They have their ancestral associations and they are also 'brightest' -- a rather worn adjective perhaps . . . but one which Hardy has chosen carefully because it's instinct with their valuation of things, the glow they put into them" (Thomas Hardy:  The Poetry of Perception, p. 207).
There is a fascinating discussion of this poem by the poets Donald Hall, Cynthia Huntington, Heather McHugh, Paul Muldoon and Charles Simic in the September 1999 edition of Harper's Magazine.  Donald Hall opens the discussion as follows:
"I'm happy to say this is the most beautiful poem in the English language.  The paraphrase of the poem is, "People have a lot of fun together, especially in families, and then they get old and die."  For me the sensuous pleasure of the poem is in conflict with its melancholy paraphrase" (47).

Overlooking the River Stour (424)

I choose this poem because of its engagement with the simple act of rapt attention and all that act entails.  As Paulin demonstrates in the book I quote from above, the act of looking is central to Hardy's poetic project; and this poem both demonstrates the acuity with which Hardy engages the world, and subjects that act of intense looking to an ethical criticism.  Recalling a moment from Hardy and Emma's life in 1877 (see Bailey's commentary, p. 387), the poem, in another tightly repetitive structure, moves through three stanzas in which the poet's eye dwells on details of life on the river:  the remarkable vision of swallows as "little crossbows animate"; the moor-hen "planing up shavings of crystal spray"; the closed kingcups dotting the meadow that "dripped in monotonous green."  And then the poem turns just as the poet fails to; we see him standing, situated between the river scene (mediated by the "drop-drenched glaze" of the window) and the domestic reality to which he pays no attention. Finally, the poet's voice comes to rest in a present alienated from the time of the poem's events by, again, an aching sense of regret:  "O never I turned, but let, alack, / These less things hold my gaze."


Proud Songsters (816)

This short poem of two intense stanzas moves from another specific observation of a natural scene -- birds in full song -- to a meditation on the nature of identity and its material underpinnings.  As it is so short, I will quote it here in its entirety:

    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 twelve-months' 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.

The initial autonomous scene of piping expands to admit the vantage point of human consciousness of the ephemeral (which lies, perhaps, at the root of self-consciousness) and asks implicitly what it would be to have an unselfconscious relationship to time -- to what extent does the "as if" of line 6 function for a bird?
The second stanza opens out further to depict the base from which animal consciousness and human self-consciousness arise; and what seems so remarkable to me is the way this stanza simultaneously embraces materialism and expresses the wonder of identity conjured from the combination of atoms.  And their recombination, as the current crop of birds will give way to the next wave of creatures endowed with 'thrush-ness' or 'finch-ness.'  (Note Baileys' quotation of Dorothy Hoare on p. 576)
It is a poem that works by implication to cultivate a seeing anew of the strangeness of being both embodied and self-aware.



I look forward to receiving comments on this list and suggestions for others by way of email.
Philip Purchase

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