Source of book: I own this
This is the third collection of Hardy’s poetry I have read, and the longest. For reasons I do not remember, I started backwards, with Winter Words, followed by Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles.
As with the other Hardy collections, I find that I have mixed feelings about Late Lyrics and Earlier. There are some excellent poems, but also a lot of Victorian dreck. Introspective poems that have aged well, next to lurid stories of dead women. So many dead women.
Perhaps the origin of the collection might help explain it. As Hardy’s introduction notes, the title refers to the fact that about half of the poems in the collection were recently written, while the other half consisted of older poems that somehow never managed to make it into earlier collections.
Exactly when these were written is not always clear - some poems have dates to them, typically from the 1910s. But others do not, and Hardy himself couldn’t remember exactly when he wrote each of them. Some feel like juvenalia, some feel unpolished, but others seem simply to be poems written earlier that missed the cut.
It is also interesting how this collection, published in 1922, fit with Hardy’s personal life. His first wife, Emma, had died in 1912. As I have noted in previous posts about Hardy, the marriage wasn’t happy, and became increasingly miserable as time went on.
However, instead of finding her death a relief, Hardy instead practically deified her. Many of the poems in this collection seem to be in that vein. Actually, in both veins, being either about a beloved dead woman or a harpy who deceived her man.
Also in the mix here is that Hardy had quickly remarried a younger woman, Florence, who wasn’t exactly thrilled that Hardy was still writing poems about his dead wife.
It’s a mess, to be sure.
Add in the Victorian tendency to write over-emotional pathos-drenched poems about beautiful and simpering women who died too young, well, you get a lot of poems that seem all too alike and not that interesting.
Hardy may have lived through the Edwardian and well into the 1920s, but his aesthetic was still firmly Victorian. There is nothing of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or even W. H. Auden in his style.
Where Hardy was ahead of his time was in his prediction of the fall of the British Empire - and indeed his deep suspicion of the entire project. For this, he was labeled a “pessimist,” which isn’t entirely accurate.
As Hardy explains in the introduction, what is alleged to be “pessimism” is actually just his introspection and questioning the presence of evil in the world. To me, these are often his best poems, telling truth slant to an audience often unwilling or unable to hear what he is saying.
Anyway, here are the poems from the collection that I liked best.
I Sometimes Think
I sometimes think as here I sit
Of things I have done,
Which seemed in doing not unfit
To face the sun:
Yet never a soul has paused a whit
On such-not one.
There was that eager strenuous press
To sow good seed;
There was that saving from distress
In the nick of need;
There were those words in the wilderness:
Who cared to heed?
Yet can this be full true, or no?
For one did care,
And, spiriting into my house, to, fro,
Like wind on the stair,
Cares still, heeds all, and will, even though
I may despair.
Is this pessimism? Or just the question of how the best that we do so often seems to go unnoticed, and unremarked?
The next poem is labeled as a song, and the very many of these he apparently intended to be sung are titled with quotation marks. This one was written soon after his first wife’s death, and I suspect it is about her.
“The Curtains Now Are Drawn”
I
The curtains now are drawn,
And the spindrift strikes the glass,
Blown up the jagged pass
By the surly salt sou'-west,
And the sneering glare is gone
Behind the yonder crest,
While she sings to me:
"O the dream that thou art my Love, be it thine,
And the dream that I am thy Love, be it mine,
And death may come, but loving is divine."
II
I stand here in the rain,
With its smite upon her stone,
And the grasses that have grown
Over women, children, men,
And their texts that " Life is vain;"
But I hear the notes as when
Once she sang to me:
"O the dream that thou art my Love, be it thine,
And the dream that I am thy Love, be it mine,
And death may come, but loving is divine."
The next one is one of my favorites.
A Night in November
I marked when the weather changed,
And the panes began to quake,
And the winds rose up and ranged,
That night, lying half-awake.
Dead leaves blew into my room,
And alighted upon my bed,
And a tree declared to the gloom
Its sorrow that they were shed.
One leaf of them touched my hand,
And I thought that it was you
There stood as you used to stand,
And saying at last you knew!
Interestingly, Hardy often wrote poems that seem similar in title and theme. There are multiple poems about nights in various months, and more than one about November. Likewise, there are whole groups of poems about birds, and ones about other topics.
I also like this next one for its atmosphere.
The Wanderer
There is nobody on the road
But I,
And no beseeming abode
I can try
For shelter, so abroad
I must lie.
The stars feel not far up,
And to be
The lights by which I sup
Glimmeringly,
Set out in a hollow cup
Over me.
They wag as though they were
Panting for joy
Where they shine, above all care,
And annoy,
And demons of despair -
Life's alloy.
Sometimes outside the fence
Feet swing past,
Clock-like, and then go hence,
Till at last
There is a silence, dense,
Deep, and vast.
A wanderer, witch-drawn
To and fro,
To-morrow, at the dawn,
On I go,
And where I rest anon
Do not know!
Yet it's meet this bed of hay
And roofless plight;
For there's a house of clay,
My own, quite,
To roof me soon, all day
And all night.
I mentioned that a number of poems seemed to be about Hardy’s first wife. This next one is the most striking.
A Wife Comes Back
This is the story a man told me
Of his life’s one day of dreamery.
A woman came into his room
Between the dawn and the creeping day:
She was the years-wed wife from whom
He had parted, and who lived far away,
As if strangers they.
He wondered, and as she stood
She put on youth in her look and air,
And more was he wonderstruck as he viewed
Her form and flesh bloom yet more fair
While he watched her there;
Till she freshed to the pink and brown
That were hers on the night when first they met,
When she was the charm of the idle town,
And he the pick of the club-fire set...
His eyes grew wet,
And he stretched his arms: ‘Stay – rest! – ’
He cried. ‘Abide with me so, my own!’
But his arms closed in on his hard bare breast;
She had vanished with all he had looked upon
Of her beauty: gone.
He clothed, and drew downstairs,
But she was not in the house, he found;
And he passed out under the leafy pairs
Of the avenue elms, and searched around
To the park-pale bound.
He mounted, and rode till night
To the city to which she had long withdrawn,
The vision he bore all day in his sight
Being her young self as pondered on
In the dim of dawn.
‘ – The lady here long ago –
Is she now here? – young – or such age as she is?’
‘ – She is still here.’ – ‘Thank God. Let her know;
She’ll pardon a comer so late as this
Whom she’d fain not miss.’
She received him – an ancient dame,
Who hemmed, with features frozen and numb,
‘How strange! – I’d almost forgotten your name! –
A call just now – is troublesome;
Why did you come?’
Another one that seems to touch on their marital troubles:
Side by Side
So there sat they,
The estranged two,
Thrust in one pew
By chance that day;
Placed so, breath-nigh,
Each comer unwitting
Who was to be sitting
In touch close by.
Thus side by side
Blindly alighted,
They seemed united
As groom and bride,
Who'd not communed
For many years -
Lives from twain spheres
With hearts distuned.
Her fringes brushed
His garment's hem
As the harmonies rushed
Through each of them:
Her lips could be heard
In the creed and psalms,
And their fingers neared
At the giving of alms.
And women and men,
The matins ended,
By looks commended
Them, joined again.
Quickly said she,
"Don't undeceive them -
Better thus leave them:"
"Quite so," said he.
Slight words! the last
Between them said,
Those two, once wed,
Who had not stood fast.
Diverse their ways
From the western door,
To meet no more
In their span of days.
After those somewhat bitter lyrics, here is one, from 1904, that seems merely melancholy. Another of my favorites.
An Autumn Rain-Scene
There trudges one to a merry-making
With sturdy swing,
On whom the rain comes down.
To fetch the saving medicament
Is another bent,
On whom the rain comes down.
One slowly drives his herd to the stall
Ere ill befall,
On whom the rain comes down.
This bears his missives of life and death
With quickening breath,
On whom the rain comes down.
One watches for signals of wreck or war
From the hill afar,
On whom the rain comes down.
No care if he gain a shelter or none,
Unhired moves on,
On whom the rain comes down.
And another knows nought of its chilling fall
Upon him at all,
On whom the rain comes down.
Here is another song that I thought was good - and perhaps also speaks of a crumbling relationship.
The Rift
’Twas just at gnat and cobweb-time,
When yellow begins to show in the leaf,
That your old gamut changed its chime
From those true tones – of span so brief! –
That met my beats of joy, of grief,
As rhyme meets rhyme.
So sank I from my high sublime!
We faced but chancewise after that,
And never I knew or guessed my crime. . . .
Yes; ’twas the date – or nigh thereat –
Of the yellowing leaf; at moth and gnat
And cobweb-time.
I love the form of this one, with the bookending of “gnat and cobweb time,” the rise in the first stanza and the descent in the second, and the way the rhyme scheme works.
I’m also a sucker for epitaphs. This next poem is a fine example of the form. The idea that our atoms live on in the universe, becoming part of other living things, is delightful.
Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard
These flowers are I, poor Fanny Hurd,
Sir or Madam,
A little girl here sepultured.
Once I flit-fluttered like a bird
Above the grass, as now I wave
In daisy shapes above my grave,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!
— I am one Bachelor Bowring, ” Gent”,
Sir or Madam;
In shingled oak my bones were pent;
Hence more than a hundred years I spent
In my feat of change from a coffin-thrall
To a dancer in green as leaves on a wall,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!
— I, these berries of juice and gloss,
Sir or Madam,
Am clean forgotten as Thomas Voss;
Thin-urned, I have burrowed away from the moss
That covers my sod, and have entered this yew,
And turned to clusters ruddy of view,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!
— The Lady Gertrude, proud, high-bred,
Sir or Madam,
Am I — this laurel that shades your head;
Into its veins I have stilly sped,
And made them of me; and my leaves now shine,
As did my satins superfine,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!
— I, who as innocent withwind climb,
Sir or Madam,
Am one Eve Greensleeves, in olden time
Kissed by men from many a clime,
Beneath sun, stars, in blaze, in breeze,
As now by glowworms and by bees,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!
— I’m old Squire Audeley Grey, who grew,
Sir or Madam,
Aweary of life, and in scorn withdrew;
Till anon I clambered up anew
As ivy-green, when my ache was stayed,
And in that attire I have longtime gayed
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!
— And so these maskers breathe to each
Sir or Madam
Who lingers there, and their lively speech
Affords an interpreter much to teach,
As their murmurous accents seem to come
Thence hitheraround in a radiant hum,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!
I’ll end with one involving musicians, because, well, you might imagine. I should also give a mention to “The Country Wedding” for its mention of the serpent, a rather unique obsolete instrument. (You can see and hear one in the A&E Pride and Prejudice series.)
In the Small Hours
I lay in my bed and fiddled
With a dreamland viol and bow,
And the tunes flew back to my fingers
I had melodied years ago.
It was two or three in the morning
When I fancy-fiddled so
Long reels and country-dances,
And hornpipes swift and slow.
And soon anon came crossing
The chamber in the gray
Figures of jigging fieldfolk -
Saviours of corn and hay -
To the air of "Haste to the Wedding,"
As after a wedding-day;
Yea, up and down the middle
In windless whirls went they!
There danced the bride and bridegroom,
And couples in a train,
Gay partners time and travail
Had longwhiles stilled amain! . . .
It seemed a thing for weeping
To find, at slumber's wane
And morning's sly increeping,
That Now, not Then, held reign.
Hardy’s career started with Under the Greenwood Tree, about the transition from church bands to the organ, and I feel he has a soft spot for the old village players - the forerunner of community orchestras and bar bands.
Anyway, those are my favorites from this collection. Hardy may or may not be your cup of tea, but he has some real gems.
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