But first things first, and the first season here is spring, which is ushered in with an awkward, almost creaking septuagenarian elegance: no sooner does May get in than it is hit by a stress. This is all the more noticeable after the indeed highly arch and creaking "When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay," with its wonderfully hissing confluence of sibilants toward the end of the line. "Tremulous stay" is a splendid conjunction, evocative, one would imagine, of the poet's very voice at this stage, and thus setting the tone for the rest of the poem.
Of course, we have to bear in mind that we are viewing the whole thing through the prism of the modern, late- twentieth-century idiom in poetry. What seems arch and antiquated through this lens wouldn't necessarily have produced the same effect at the time. When it comes to generating circumlocutions, death has no equals, and at the Last Judgment it could cite them in its defense. And as such circumlocutions go, "When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay" is wonderful if only because it shows a poet more concerned with his diction than with the prospect he describes. There is a peace in this line, not least because the stressed words here are two and three syllables long; the unstressed syllables play the rest of these words down with the air of a postscript or an afterthought.
Actually, the stretching ofthe hexameter—i.e., time— and filling it up begins with "tremulous stay." But things really get busy once the stress hits "May" in the second line, which consists solely ofmonosyllables. Euphonically, the net result in the second line is an impression that Mr. Hardy's spring is more rich in leaf than any August. Psychologically, however, one has the sense of piling-up qualifiers spilling well into the third line, with its hyphenated, Homer-like epithets. The overall sensation (embodied in the future per- feet tense) is that of time slowed down, stalled by its every second, for that's what monosyllabic words are: uttered—or printed—seconds.
"The best eye for natural detail," enthused Yvor Winters about Thomas Hardy. And we, of course, can admire this eye sharp enough to liken the reverse side of a leaf to newly spun silk—but only at the expense of praising the ear. As you read these lines out loud, you stumble through the second, and you've got to mumble fast through the first half of the third. And it occurs to you that the poet has stuffed these lines with so much natural detail not for its own sake but for reasons of metric vacancy.
The truth, of course, is that it's both: that's your real natural detaiclass="underline" the ratio of, say, a leaf to the amount of space in a line. It may fit, and then it may not. This is the way a poet learns the value of that leaf as well as of those available stresses. And it is to alleviate the syllabic density of the preceding line that Mr. Hardy produces the almost trochaic "Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk" qualifier, not out of attachment to this leaf and this particular sensation. Had he been attached to them, he'd have moved them to the rhyming position, or in any case out of the tonal limbo where you find them.
Still, technically speaking, this line and a half do show off what Mr. Winters appreciates so much about our poet. And our poet himself is cognizant of trotting out natural detail here, and polishing it up a bit on top of that. And this is what enables him to wrap it up with the colloquial " 'He was a man who used to notice such things.' " This understatement, nicely counterbalancing the opening line's ramshackle grandeur, is what he was perhaps after in the first place. It's highly quotable, so he attributes it to the neighbors, clearing the line of the charge of self-consciousness, let alone ofbeing an autoepitaph.
There is no way for me to prove this—though there is also no way to refute it—but I think the first and last lines, "When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay" and " 'He was a man who used to notice such things,' " existed long before "Afterwards" was conceived, independently. Natural detail got in between them by chance, because it provided a rhyme (not a very spectacular one, so it needed a qualifier). Once there, it gave the poet a stanza, and with that came the pattern for the rest of the poem.
One indication of this is the uncertainty of the season in the next stanza. I'd suggest it's autumn, since the stanzas after deal respectively \\ith summer and winter; and the leafless thorn seems fallow and chilled. This succession is slightly odd in Hardy, who is a superb plotter and who, you might think, would be one to handle the seasons in the traditional, orderly manner. That said, however, the second stanza is a work of unique beauty.
It all starts \\ith yet another confluence of sibilants in "eyelid's soundless blink." Again, proving and refuting may be a problem, but I tend to think that "an eyelid's soundless blink" is a reference to Petrarch's "One life is shorter than an eyelid's blink"; "Afterwards," as we know, is a poem about one's demise.
But even if we abandon the first line with its splendid caesura followed by those two rustling s's between "eyelid's" and "soundless," ending with two more s's, we've got plenty here. First, we have this very cinematographic, slow-motion passage of "The dewfall-hawk" that "comes crossing the shades to alight ..." And we have to pay attention to his choice of the word "shades," considering our subject. And if we do, we may further wonder about this "dewfall-hawk," about its "dewfall" bit especially. What, we may ask, does this "dewfall," following an eyelid's blink and preceding "shade," try to do here, and is it, perhaps, a well-buried tear? And don't we hear in "to alight/Upon the wind-warped upland thorn" a reined-in or overpowered emotion?
Perhaps we don't. Perhaps all we hear is a pileup of stresses, at best evoking through their "up/warp/up" sound the clapping of wind-pestered shrubs. Against such a backdrop, an impersonal, unreacting "gazer" would be an apt way to describe the onlooker, stripped of any human characteristics, reduced to eyesight. "Gazer" is fitting, since he observes our speaker's absence and thus can't be described in detaiclass="underline" probability can't be terribly particular. Similarly the hawk, batting its wings like eyelids through "the shades," is moving through the same absence. The refrainlike "To him this must have been a familiar sight" is all the more poignant because it cuts both ways: the hawk's flight here is as real as it is posthumous.
On the whole, the beauty of"Afterwards" is that everything in it is multiplied by two.
The next stanza considers, I believe, the summer, and the opening line overwhelms you with its tactility in "mothy and warm," all the more palpable because it is isolated by a very bravely shifted caesura. Yet speaking of bravery, it should be noted that only a very healthy person can ponder the nocturnal blackness of the moment of his demise with such equipoise as we find in "If I pass during some nocturnal blackness ..." Not to mention more cavalier treatment of the caesura. The only mark of possible alarm here is the "some" before "nocturnal blackness." On the other hand, "some" is one of those readily available bricks a poet uses to save his meter.
Be that as it may, the real winner in this stanza is obviously "When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn"—and within the line itself it is, ofcourse, "furtively." The rest is slightly less animated and certainly less interesting, since our poet is clearly bent on endearing himself to the public with his animal-kingdom sympathies. That's quite unnecessary, since, given the subject, the reader is on his side as it is. Also, if one wanted to be really hard-nosed here, one could query whether that hedgehog was indeed in harm's way. At this stage, however, nobody wants to quibble. But the poet himself seems to be aware of the insufficiency of the material here; so he saddles his hexameter with three additional syllables ("One may say")— partly because the awkwardness of speech, he believes, suggests geniality, partly to stretch the dying man's time—or the time he is remembered.