"At Castle Boterel":

Introduction to a reading of the poem



I am going to read “At Castle Boterel” by Thomas Hardy.  While I was growing up on a farm in rural Dorset, Hardy’s novels cast on the landscape surrounding me the glamour of a parallel existence: there was the map at the front of Far from the Madding Crowd to prove how you could take mundane villages and fields and imprint on them forever your own image.  And then there was the evidence of how fiction transforms bricks and mortar: from my bedroom window I could see a tower, a gargoyled folly built in the Georgian rush towards studied eccentricity.  I suppose an abandoned tower looking out over the next set of hills would always be irresistible to someone feeling alternately trapped by his surroundings and wanting to burrow deeper into the past, but this particular tower was already charged with meaning- the neglected early romance Two on a Tower is a product of Hardy’s interaction with this particular site.  Its story of the ill-matched liaison of a young astronomer from a lower class with the lady of the manor creaks today, but it is in this novel that Hardy first draws out the implications of setting human affairs against a backdrop of cosmic indifference.  Such indifference haunts his writing.  As a Classicist I have always loved the way he chooses to phrase the ending of Tess’ tragedy: “ 'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.”

The poem I will read sets human passion against the indifferent immensity of time- but it also conjures with the possibility that passion can ineradicably mark the landscape. “At Castle Boterel” speaks to me as an expression of how we might take surroundings which are already “written over”, as it were, and make them to some extent our own, as we minutely measure the moments we spend and store them up for future recollection.  But Hardy’s vision of past happiness is corroded by the regret that shadows the whole cycle Poems of 1912-13: that cycle is a product of the guilt and grief he felt after his wife’s death.  For decades they had lived together yet alone; as he writes in "The Going", “Why, then, latterly did we not speak, / Did we not think of those days long dead, / And ere your vanishing strive to seek / That time's renewal?”  If the significance of the present moment lies in future recollection, “At Castle Boterel” expresses how recollection of past love makes personal experience in a world of “primaeval rocks” possible, and suggests how much of that experience is susceptible to stagnation and loss:  "I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking, / I look back at it amid the rain / For the very last time . . ."

Philip Purchase

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