It is in the fourth, winter stanza that the poem confronts absence in earnest.
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"?
To begin with, being "stilled at last" includes within its euphemistic reach the author taking leave of the poem, as well as the poem's previous stanza growing silent. This way the audience, more numerous than "the neighbors," "a gazer," or "one," is ushered here into the text and asked to play the role of "Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees." This is an extraordinary line; the natural detail here is positively terrifying and practically prefigures Robert Frost. For winter indeed sees more "heavens," since in winter trees are naked and the air is clear. If these heavens are full- starred, it, winter, sees more stars. The line is an apotheosis of absence, yet Mr. Hardy seeks to aggravate it further with "Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more." " 'Rise" imparts to the presumably cold features of the "stilled at last" the temperature of the moon.
Behind all this there is, of course, an old trope about the souls of the dead residing on stars. Still, the optical literalness of this rendition is blinding. Apparently when you see a winter sky you see Thomas Hardy. That's the kind of mystery he had an eye for, in his lifetime.
He had an eye for something closer to the ground, too. As you read "Afterwards," you begin to notice the higher and higher position in the lines of each stanza of those who are to comment on him. From the bottom in the first, they climb to the top in the fifth. This could be a coincidence with anyone other than Hardy. We also have to watch their progression from "the neighbours" to "a gazer" to "one" to "they" to "any." None of these designations is particular, let alone endearing. Well, who are these people?
Before we get to that, let's learn something about "any" and what he expects from them.
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"?
There is no particular season here, which means it's any time. It's any backdrop also, presumably a countryside, with a church in the fields, and its bell tolling. The observation described in the second and third lines is lovely but too common for our poet to claim any distinction for making it. It's his ability to describe it that "any" might refer to by saying in his absence, "He hears it not now, but used to notice such things." Also, "such things" is a sound: interrupted by wind yet returning anew. An interrupted but resuming sound could be regarded here, at the end of this autoelegy, as a self-referential metaphor, and not because the sound in question is that of a bell tolling for Thomas Hardy.
It is so because an interrupted yet resuming sound is, in fact, a metaphor for poetry: for a succession of poems emerging from under the same pen, for a succession of stanzas within one poem. It is a metaphor for "Afterwards" itself, with all its peregrination of stresses and suddenly halting caesuras. In this sense, the bell of quittance never stops— not Mr. Hardy's, anyway. And it doesn't stop as long as his "neighbors," "gazers," "one," "they," and "any" are us.
IX
Extraordinary claims for a dead poet are best made on the basis of his entire oeuvre; as we are perusing only some of Thomas Hardy's work, we may dodge the temptation. Suffice it to say that he is one of the very few poets who, under minimal scrutiny, easily escape the past. What helps his escape is obviously the content of his poems: they are simply extraordinarily interesting to read. And to reread, since their texture is very often pleasure-resistant. That was his whole gamble, and he won.
Out of the past there is only one route, and it takes you into the present. However, Hardy's poetry is not a very comfortable presence here. He is seldom taught, still less read. First, with respect to content at least, he simply overshadows the bulk of poetry's subsequent achievement: a comparison renders too many a modern giant a simpleton. As for the general readership, his thirst for the inanimate comes off as unappealing and disconcerting. Rather than the general public's mental health, this bespeaks its mental diet.
As he escapes the past, and sits awkwardly in the present, one trains one's eye on the future as perhaps his more appropriate niche. It is possible, although the technological and demographic watershed we are witnessing would seem to obliterate any foresight or fantasy based on our own relatively coherent experience. Still, it is possible, and not only because the triumphant Immanent Will might decide to acknowledge, at the peak of its glory, its early champion.
It is possible because Thomas Hardy's poetry makes considerable inroads into what is the target of all cognition: inanimate matter. Our species embarked on this quest long ago, rightly suspecting that we share our own cellular mix- up with the stuff, and that should the truth about the world exist, it's bound to be nonhuman. Hardy is not an exception. What is exceptional about him, however, is the relentless- ness of his pursuit, in the course of which his poems began to acquire certain impersonal traits of his very subject, especially tonally. That could be regarded, of course, as camouflage, like wearing fatigues in the trenches.
Or like a new line offashion that set a trend in English poetry in this century: the dispassionate posture became practically the norm, indifference a trope. Still, these were just side effects; I daresay he went after the inanimate—not for its jugular, since it has none, but for its diction.
Come to think of it, the expression "matter-of-fact" could well apply to his idiom, except that the emphasis would be on matter. His poems very often sound as if matter has acquired the power of speech as yet another aspect of its human disguise. Perhaps this was indeed the case with Thomas Hardy. But then it's only natural, because as somebody—most likely it was I—once said, language is the inanimate s first line of information about itself, released to the animate. Or, to put it more accurately, language is a diluted aspect of matter.
It is perhaps because his poems almost invariably (once they exceed sixteen lines) either display the inanimate's touch or else keep an eye on it that the future may carve for him a somewhat larger niche than he occupies in the present. To paraphrase "Afterwards" somewhat, he used to notice un- human things; hence his "eye for natural detail," and numerous tombstone musings. Whether the future will be able to comprehend the laws governing matter better than it has done thus far remains to be seen. But it doesn't seem to have much choice in acknowledging a greater degree of human affinity with the inanimate than literature and philosophical thought have been insisting on.
This is what enables one to see in a crystal ball unfamiliar multitudes in odd attire making a run on the Scribner's edition of Hardy's Collected Works or the Penguin Selected.
Ninety Years Later
i
Written in 1904, "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes," by Rainer Maria Rilke, makes one wonder whether the greatest work of the century wasn't done ninety years ago. At the moment of its composition, its German author was twenty-nine years old and leading a rather peripatetic life that brought him first to Rome, where the poem was started, and, later the same year, to Sweden, where it was finished. We should say no more about the circumstances of its emergence, for the simple reason that what this poem adds up to can't be squared with any experience.