Hence the next line, which is the highest point in this stanza. In "And be spoken of as one who was not," one detects the sense not so much of loss or unbearable absence as that of all-consuming negation. "One who was not" is too resolute for comfort or, for that matter, for discomfort, and negation of an individual is what death is all about. Therefore, "Beholding it with a heedless eye/As alien from you" is not a scolding but rather an admission of the appropriate response. With ". . . though under its tree/You soon would halt everlastingly" the carriage and the exposition part of the poem indeed come to a halt.
Essentially, the central theme of these two stanzas is their heroine's lack of any inkling or premonition of her approaching end. This could be perceived as a remarkable expectation indeed, were it not for her age. Besides, although throughout the cycle the poet insists on the suddenness of Emma Hardy's demise, it's obvious from other sources that she was afflicted with several ailments, including a mental disorder. But presumably there was something about her that made him convinced ofher durability; perhaps that had to do with his notion of himself as the Immanent Will's plaything.
And although many would regard the third stanza's opening as heralding the theme of guilt and remorse that the same many would detect in the whole cycle, "I drove not with you" is just a restatement of that premonition's requirement; worse comes to worse, of his probable failure
v
Dim moon-eyed fishes near Gaze at the gilded gear And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"
Welclass="underline" while was fashioning This creature of cleaving wing, The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate For her—so gaily great— A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history,
Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event,
"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, of 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."
And here is our heroine, verbatim. Because of the deftly blended tenses, this is a voice from beyond the grave as much as from the past. And it is relentless. With every next sentence, she takes away what she has given a sentence before. And what she gives and takes is obviously his humanity. This way she reveals herself to be indeed a good match for her poet. There is a strong echo of marital argument in these lines, the intensity of which overcomes completely the list- lessness of the verse. It gets much louder here and drowns the sound ofthe carriage wheels on the cobblestones. To say the least, dead, Emma Hardy is capable of invading her poet's future to the point of making him defend himself.
What we have in this stanza is essentially an apparition. And although the cycle's epigraph—"Traces of an old flame"—is taken from Virgil, this particular passage bears a very close resemblance, both in pitch and substance—to the famous elegy by Sextus Propertius, from his "Cynthia Mono- biblos." The last two lines in this stanza, in any case, sound like a good translation of Cynthia's final plea: "And as for your poems in my honor, burn them, burn them!"
The only escape from such negation is into the future, and that's the route our poet takes: "True: never you'll know." That future, however, should be fairly distant, since its foreseeable part, the poet's present, is already occupied. Hence, "And you will not mind" and "But shall I then slight you because of such?" Still, with that escape comes—in this last stanza's first line especially—a piercing recognition of the ultimate parting, of the growing distance. Characteristically, Hardy handles this line with terrific reserve, allowing only a sigh to escape in the caesura and a slight elevation of pitch in "mind." Yet the suppressed lyricism bursts into the open and claims its o^ in "Dear ghost."
He indeed addresses an apparition, but one that's free of any ecclesiastical dimension. This is not a particularly mellifluous form of address, which alone convinces one of its literalness. He is not searching here for a tactful alternative. (What could there be instead? The meter, allotting him here only two syllables, rules out "Dear Emma"; what then, "Dear friend"?) A ghost she is, and not because she is dead, but because though less than a physical reality she is far more than just a memory: she is an entity he can address, a presence—or absence—he is familiar with. It's not the inertia of marriage but of time itself—thirty-eight years of it—that solidifies into a substance: what may be, he feels, only hardened by his future, which is but another increment of time.
Hence, "Dear ghost." Thus designated, she can almost be touched. Or else "ghost" is the ultimate in detachment. And for somebody who ran the whole gamut of attitudes available to one human being vis-a-vis another, from pure love to total indifference—"ghost" offers one more possibility, if you will, a postscript, a sum total. "Dear ghost" is uttered here indeed with an air of discovery and of summary, which is what, in fact, the poem offers two lines later: "Yet abides the fact, indeed, the same,—/You are past love, praise, indifference, blame." This describes not only the condition of a ghost but also a new attitude attained by the poet —an attitude that permeates the cycle of Poems 1912-13 and without which that cycle wouldn't be possible.
This finale's enumeration of attitudes is tactically similar to "The Convergence of the Twain" 's "grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent." Yet while it is propelled by similar self- deprecating logic, it adds up not to the reductive ("choose one") precision of analysis but to an extraordinary emotional summary that redefines the genre of funeral elegy no less than that of love poetry itself. Immediate as the former, "Your Last Drive" amounts, on account of its finale, to a much-delayed postscript, rarely encountered in poetry, to what love amounts to. Such a summary is obviously the minimal requirement for engaging a ghost in a dialogue, and the last line has an engaging, indeed somewhat flirtatious air. Our old man is wooing the inanimate.
VII
Every poet learns from his own breakthroughs, and Hardy, with his professed tendency to "'exact a full look at the worst," seems to profit in, and from, Poems of 1912-13 enormously. For all its riches of detail and topographical reference, the cycle has an oddly universal, almost impersonal quality, since it deals with the extremes of the emotional spectrum. "A full look at the worst" is well matched by a full look at the best, with very short shrift given to the mean. It is as though a book were being riffled through from the end to the beginning before being shelved.
It never got shelved. A rationalist more than an emotionalist, Hardy, of course, saw the cycle as an opportunity to rectify what many and in part he himself regarded as a lyrical deficiency in his poetry. And true enough, Poems of 1912-13 does constitute a considerable departure from his pattern of graveyard musing, grand on metaphysics and yet usually rather bland sentimentally. That's what accounts for the cycle's enterprising stanzaic architecture, but above all for its zeroing in on the initial stage of his marital union: on meeting a maiden.