I am arguing, I suppose, against seeing this poet through the prism of those who came in his stead. First, because, in most cases, those who came in his stead were operating in relative or absolute ignorance of Hardy the poet's existence—on this side of the Atlantic particularly. The very dearth of literature about Hardy the poet is both that ignorance's proof and its present echo. Second, because, on the whole, there is little point in reviewing the larger through the prism of the smaller, however vociferous and numerous; our discipline is no astronomy. Mainly, however, because the presence of Hardy the novelist impairs one's eyesight from the threshold, and no critic I know of can resist the temptation to hitch the prose writer to the poet, with the inevitable diminution of the poems as a consequence—if only because the critic's own medium isn't verse.
So to a critic, the prospect of dealing with Hardy's work should look quite messy. To begin with, if one's life holds the key to one's work, as received wisdom claims, then, in Hardy's case, the question is: Which work? Is this or that mishap reflected in this novel, or in that poem, and why not in both? And if a novel, what then is a poem for? And vice versa? Especially since there are about nine novels and roughly a thousand poems in his corpus. Which of these is, should you wax Freudian, a form of sublimation? And how come one keeps sublimating up to the ripe age of eighty- eight, for Hardy kept writing poems to the very end (his last, tenth collection came out posthumously)? And should one really draw a line between novelist and poet, or isn't it better to lump them together, echoing Mother Nature?
I say, let's separate them. At any rate, that's what we are going to do in this room. To make a long story short, a poet shouldn't be viewed through any prism other than that of his poems. Besides, technically speaking, Thomas Hardy was a novelist for twenty-six years only. And since he wrote poetry alongside his novels, one could argue that he was a poet for sixty years in a row. To say the least, for the last thirty years of his life; after Jude the Obscure—his last and, in my view, his greatest novel—received unfavorable notices, he quit fiction altogether and concentrated on poetry. That alone—the thirty years of verse writing—should be enough to qualify him for the status of a poet. After all, thirty years in this field is an average length for one's career, not to mention life.
So let's give Mother Nature short shrift. Let's deal with the poet's poems. Or, to put it differently, let's bear in mind that human artifice is as organic as any natural masterpiece, which, if we are to believe our naturalists, is also a product of tremendous selection. You see, there are roughly two ways of being natural in this world. One is to strip down to one's un- derthings, or beyond, and get exposed, as it were, to the elements. That would be, say, a Lawrentian approach, adopted in the second halfofthis century by many a scribbling dimwit —in our parts, I regret to inform you, especially. The other approach is best exemplified by the following four-liner, written by the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam:
Rome is but nature's twin, which has reflected Rome. We see its civic might, the signs of its decorum in the transparent air, the firmament's blue dome, the colonnades of groves and in the meadow's forum.
Mandelstam is a Russian, as I said. Yet this quatrain comes in handy because oddly enough it has more to do with Thomas Hardy than anything by D. H. Lawrence, a Brit.
Anyway, at the moment I'd like to go with you through several poems by Mr. Hardy, which by now I hope you have memorized. We'll go through them line by line, so that, apart from whetting your appetite for this poet, you'll be able to see the process of selection that occurs in the course of composition, and that echoes and—if you don't mind my saying so—outshines the similar process described in the Origin of Species, if only because the latter's net result is us, not Mr. Hardy's poems. So let me succumb to the perfectly Darwinian, logical as well as chronological temptation to address the poems belonging to the aforementioned thirty- year period, i.e., to the poems written by Thomas Hardy in the second part of his career, which also means in our cen- tun-. this way, we leave the novelist behind.
III
Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and died in 1928. His father was a stonemason and could not afl'ord to support him in a scholarly career, apprenticing him instead to a local church architect. He studied Greek and Latin classics on his own, however, and wrote in his off-hours until the success of Far from the Madding Crowd allowed him to quit the job at the age of thirty-four. Thus, his literary career, which started in 1871, allows itself to be fairly neatly divided into two almost even parts: into the Victorian and modern periods, since Queen Victoria conveniently dies in 1901. Bearing in mind that both terms are but catchwords, we'll nevertheless use them for reasons of economy, in order to save ourselves some breath. \Ve shouldn't scrutinize the obvious; as regards our poet, the word "Victorian" catches in particular Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, George Meredith, both Rossettis, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Tennyson of course, and. conceivably, Gerard Manley Hopkins and A. E. Housman. To these you might add Charles Darwin himself, Carlyle, Disraeli, John Stuart Mill, Ruskin, Samuel Butler, Walter Pater. But let's stop here: that should give you the general idea of the mental and stlistic parameters—or pressures—pertinent at the time for our poet. Let's leave
Cardinal Newman out of it, because our man was a biological determinist and agnostic; let's also leave out the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, and other fiction writers, because they mattered to Mr. Hardy when he was one of them but not, for instance, when he set out to write "The Darkling Thrush," which is our first poem.
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffied plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.
Now, although this thirty-two-line job is Thomas Hardy's most anthologized poem, it is not exactly the most typical of him, being extremely fluent. And that's why perhaps it's so frequently anthologized; although, save for one line in it, it could have been written by practically anyone of talent and, well, insight. These properties are not so rare in English poetry, at the turn of the century especially. It is a very fluent, very lucid poem; its texture is smooth and its structure is conservative enough to hark back to the ballad; its argument is clear and well sustained. In other words, there is very little here of vintage Hardy; and now is as good a time as any to tell you what vintage Hardy is like.