VI
The question is why, and the answer arrives in the form of a cycle of poems written by Mr. Hardy a year after ''The Convergence of the Twain," the famous Poems of 1912-13. As we are about to embark on discussing one of them, let's bear in mind that the feminine ship was lost and that the masculine Shape of Ice survived the encounter. That the remarkable lack ofsentimentality, warranted in principle by both the genre and the subject of the poem, could be attributed to our poet's inability to identify here with the loser, if only because of the ship's gender.
Poems of 1912-13 was occasioned by the poet's loss of his wife of thirty-eight years, Emma Lavinia Gifford, who died on November 27, 1912, eight months after the Titanic disaster. Twenty-one pieces in all, these poems amount to the Shape of Ice's meltdown.
To make a long story short, the marriage was long and unhappy enough to give "The Convergence of the Twain" its central metaphor. It was also sufficiently solid to make at least one of its participants regard himself as a plaything of the Immanent Will, and, as such playthings go, a cold one. Had Emma Hardy outlived her husband, this poem would stand as a remarkable, albeit oblique, monument to the morose equilibrium of their dissociate lives, to the low temperature of the poet's heart.
The sudden death of Emma Hardy shattered this equilibrium. In a manner of speaking, the Shape of Ice suddenly found itself on its very own. In another manner of speaking, Poems of ipi2-23 is essentially this Iceberg's lament for the vanished ship. As such, it is a meticulous reconstruction of the casualty; the by-product, naturally, of an excruciating self-examination rather than a metaphysical quest for the tragedy's origins. After all, no casualty can be redeemed by exposing its causality.
That's why this cycle is essentially retrospective. To make a long story still shorter, its heroine is not Emma Hardy, the wife, but precisely Emma Lavinia Gifford, the bride: a maiden. The poems look at her through the dim prism of thirty-eight years of marriage, through the foggy hard crystal of Emma Hardy herself. If this cycle has a hero, it is the past with its happiness or, to put it a bit more accurately, with its promise of happiness.
As human predicaments go, the story is sufficiently common. As a subject for elegiac poetry, the loss of the beloved is common as well. What makes Poems of 1912-13 slightly unusual at the outset is not only the age of the poet and his heroine but the sheer number of poems and their formal variety. A characteristic feature with elegies occasioned by someone's demise is their tonal, to say the least, metric uniformity. In the case of this cycle, however, we have a remarkable metric diversity, which points to the possibility that craftsmanship was a no lesser issue for the poet here than the issue itself.
A psychological explanation for this variety might be, of course, that it has to do with our poet's grief searching for an adequate form of expression. Still, the formal intricacy of the twenty-one attempts made in that direction suggests a greater pressure behind this cycle than pure grief or, for that matter, any single sentiment. So let us take a look at perhaps the least stanzaically enterprising among these poems and try to find out what's going on.
YOUR LAST DRIVE
Here by the moorway you returned,
And saw the borough lights ahead
That lit your face—all undiscerned
To be in a week the face of the dead,
And you told of the charm of that haloed view
That never again would beam on you.
And on your left you passed the spot Where eight days later you were to lie, And be spoken of as one who was not; Beholding it with a heedless eye As alien from you, though under its tree You soon would halt everlastingly.
I drove not with you . . . Yet had I sat At your side that eve I should not have seen That the countenance I was glancing at Had a last-time look in the flickering sheen,
Nor have read the writing upon your face, "I go hence soon to my resting-place;
"You may miss me then. But I shall not know How many times you visit me there, Or what your thoughts are, or if you go There never at all. And I shall not care. Should you censure me I shall take no heed, And even your praises no more shall need."
True: never you'll know. And you will not mind. But shall I then slight you because of such? Dear ghost, in the past did you ever find The thought "What profit," move me much? Yel' abides the fact, indeed, the same,— You are past love, praise, indifference, blame.
"Your Last Drive" is the second in the cycle and, according to the date underneath, was written less than a month after Emma Hardy's death, i.e., when the shock of her departure was very fresh. Ostensibly an evocation of her returning home in the evening from a routine outing that proved to be her last, the poem for its first two stanzas appears to explore the paradox of the interplay between motion and stasis. The carriage carrying the heroine past the place where she shortly will be buried seems to arrest the poet's imagination as a metaphor either of mobility's myopic vision of immobility or of space's disregard for either. In any case, the mental input in these stanzas is somewhat larger than the sentimental one, though the latter comes first.
More accurately, the poem strays from the emotional into the rational, and rather quickly so. In this sense, it is indeed vintage Hardy, for the trend is seldom the reverse with him. Besides, every poem is a means of transportation by definition, and this one is only more so, since metrically at least it is about a means of transportation. With its iambic tetrameter and the shifting caesura that makes its fifth line slide into an anapest, its stanza wonderfully conveys the tilting movement of a horse-driven carriage, and the closing couplets mimic its arrival. As is inevitable with Hardy, this pattern is sustained throughout the poem.
We first see the features of the cycle's heroine lit—most likely dimly—by "the borough lights ahead." The lighting here is more cinematic than poetic; nor does the word "borough" heighten the diction much—something you would expect when it comes to the heroine's appearance. Instead, a line and a half are expended on stressing—literally, and with a touch of tautological relish—her lack of awareness of the impending transformation into being "the face of the dead." In effect, her features are absent; and the only explanation for our poet's not grabbing this opportunity to depict them is the prospect of the cycle already existing in his head (although no poet is ever sure of his ability to produce the next poem). What's present of her, however, in this stanza is her speech, echoed in "And you told of the charm of that haloed view." One hears in this line her "It's charming," and conceivably, "Such a halo!" as she was by all accounts a churchgoing woman.
The second stanza sticks to the "moorway" topography no less than to the chronology of events. Apparently the heroine's outing occurred one week—perhaps slightly less —before she died, and she was interred on the eighth day at this place, apparently to her left as she drove home by the moorway. Such literalness may owe here to the poet's deliberately reining in his emotion, and "spot" suggests a conscious deflation. It is certainly in keeping with the notion of a carriage trundling along, supported, as it were, by leaf-springs of tetrameters. Yet knowing Hardy's appetite for detail, for the mundane, one may as well assume that no special effort was applied here and no special significance was sought. He simply registers the pedestrian manner in which an absurdly drastic change has taken place.