In theory, that encounter ensures an upsurge of positive sentiment, and at times it does. But it was so long ago that the optic ofintro- and retrospection often proves insufficient. As such it gets unwittingly replaced by the lens habitually employed by our poet for pondering his beloved infinities, Immanent Wills, and all, exacting a full look at the worst.
It seems he's got no other instruments anyway: whenever faced with a choice between a moving or a drastic utterance, he normally goes for the latter. This may be attributed to certain aspects of Mr. Hardy's character or temperament; a more appropriate attribution would be to the metier itself.
For poetry for Thomas Hardy was above all a tool of cognition. His correspondence as well as his prefaces to various editions of his work are full of disclaimers of a poet's status; they often emphasize the diaristic, commentary role his poetry had for him. I think this can be taken at face value. We should bear in mind also that the man was an autodidact, and autodidacts are always more interested in the essence of what they are learning than its actual data. When it comes to poetry, this boils down to an emphasis on revelatory capacity, often at the expense of harmony.
To be sure, Hardy went to extraordinary lengths to master harmony, and his craftsmanship often borders on the exemplary. Still, it is just craftsmanship. He is no genius at harmony; his lines seldom sing. The music available in his poems is a mental music, and as such it is absolutely unique. The main distinction of Thomas Hardy's verse is that its formal aspects—rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc.—are precisely the aspects standing in attendance to the driving force of his thought. In other words, they seldom generate that force; their main job is to usher in an idea and not to obstruct its progress.
I suppose if asked what he values more in a poem—the insight or the texture—he would cringe, but ultimately he would give the autodidact's reply: the insight. This is, then, the criterion by which one is to judge his work, and this cycle in particular. It is the extension of human insight that he sought in this study of the extremes of estrangement and attachment, rather than pure self-expression. In this sense, this pre-modernist was without peer. In this- sense also, his poems are indeed a true reflection of the metier itself, whose operational mode, too, is the fusion of the rational and the intuitive. It could be said, however, that he turned the tables somewhat: he was intuitive about his work's substance; as for his verse's formal aspects, he was excessively rational.
For that he paid dearly. A good example of this could be his "In the Moonlight," written a couple of years later but in a sense belonging to Poems of 1912-13—if not necessarily thematically, then by virtue of its psychological vector.
"O lonely workman, standing there In a dream, why do you stare and stare At her grave, as no other grave there were?
"If your great gaunt eyes so importune Her soul by the shine of this corpse-cold moon Maybe you'll raise her phantom soon!"
"Why, fool, it is what I would rather see
Than all the living folk there be;
But alas, there is no such joy for me!"
"Ah—she was one you loved, no doubt, Through good and evil, through rain and drought, And when she passed, all your sun went out?"
"Nay: she was the woman I did not love, Whom all the others were ranked above, Whom during her life I thought nothing of."
Like an extremely high percentage of Hardy's verse, the poem seems to hark back to the folk ballad, with its use of dialogue and its element of social commentary. The mock romantic opening and the nagging lapidary tone of triplets —not to mention the poem's very title—suggest a polemical aspect to "In the Moonlight" when viewed within the contemporary poetic discourse. The poem is obviously a "variation on a theme" frequent enough in Hardy's own work in the first place.
The overtones of social commentary, usually fairly sharp in a ballad, are somewhat muted here, though not entirely. Rather, they are subordinated to the psychological thrust of the poem. It is extremely shrewd of the poet to make precisely a "workman," and not the urbane, sneering passerby the carrier of the loaded, terrifying insight revealed in the last stanza. For normally a crisis-ridden conscience in literature is the property of the educated classes. Here, however, it is an uncouth, almost plebeian "workman" who weighs in with at once the most menacing and the most tragic admission Hardy's verse ever made.
Yet although the syntax here is fairly clear, the meter sustained, and the psychology powerful, the poem's texture undermines its mental achievement with its triple rhyme, warranted neither by the story line nor, what's worse, its own quality. In short, the job is expert but not particularly rewarding. We get the poem's vector, not its target. But as far as the truth about the human heart is concerned, this vector may be enough. That's what the poet, one imagines, has told himself on this and on many other occasions. For the full look at the worst blinds you to your own appearance.
VIII
Blissfully, Hardy lived long enough not to be trapped by either his achievements or his failures. Therefore, we may concentrate on his achievements, perhaps with an additional sense of their humanity or, if you will, independent of it. Here's one of them, a poem called "Afterwards." It was written somewhere around 1917, when quite a lot of people all over the place were busy doing each other in and when our poet was sevent'-seven years old.
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say, "He was a man who used to notice such things"?
If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think, "To him this must have been a familiar sight."
If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm.
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone."
If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees, Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more, "He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"?
And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings, Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom, "He hears it not now, but used to notice such things"?
These twenty hexametric lines are the glory of English poetry, and they owe all that they've got precisely to hexameter. The good question is to what does hexameter itself owe its appearance here, and the answer is so that the old man can breathe more easily. Hexameter is here not for its epic or by the same classical token elegiac connotations but for its trimeter-long, inhale-exhale properties. On the subconscious level, this comfort translates into the availability of time, into a generous margin. Hexameter, if you will, is a moment stretched, and with every next word Thomas Hardy in "Afterwards" stretches it even further.
The conceit in this poem is fairly simple: while considering his immanent passing, the poet produces cameo representations of each one of the four seasons as his departure's probable backdrop. Remarkably well served by its title and free of the emotional investment usually accompanying a poet when such prospects are entertained, the poem proceeds at a pace of melancholy meditation—which is what Mr. Hardy, one imagines, wanted it to be. It appears, however, that somewhere along the way the poem escaped his control and things began to occur in it not according to the initial plan. In other words, art has overtaken craft.