Thomas Hardy: Poems of 1912-13
A Review by Cooper Renner
Hardy for the most part wrote his poems in the first person, but
that first person, that "I," was almost never Hardy. Rather it was Ralph
Blossom, or a "trampwoman," or a young lover, or the adulterer of "The
Two Wives." Occasionally, however, Hardy placed himself into his poems,
and the 21 lyrics of "Poems of 1912-13" are the most notable examples of
this occasion. And yet, for all their specificity of detail, their
emotional sources are so broadly human, and Hardy so loath to write
autobiography instead of poetry, that there is virtually nothing within
them that smacks of the dreary confessionalism we have come to know so
well.
The emotional directness is notable, as is the "universal" application--
Hardy, here, could be any grieving man who has lost a somewhat estranged
wife and has realized, following her death, how much he still needed her
and how much he now regrets their estrangement. For that, truly, is what
the poem is about-- not simply the loss, but the loss compounded by the
bad years that preceded it. In fact, with the exception of a couple of
pronouns and nouns, the speaker of this poem could as well be a widow as
a widower, or a child mourning a parent. And that, of course, is one of
the "secrets" of creating a truly remarkable poem-- utilizing one's own
feelings in such a masterly way as to speak to many related kinds of
emotional contexts.
Even so, "The Going" would not be a fine poem, for all its
applicability, were Hardy's language and music not so nearly flawless--
for it is language, and not psychology, that creates poetry. And I say
"nearly flawless" because the first stanza, which opens so well, stumbles
badly immediately following the quote above:
Ugh! you might well say-- and quite rightly. Hardy here allows his
devotion to music and stanzaic complexity to overrule his critical eye.
But he recovers his grip on the poem, and it moves on with grace and
precision.
You may miss me then. But I shall not know
He freely agrees with her, acknowledging that she will not know
what he will do after she dies, but he will keep his private
commemorations anyway. The poem is full of ashes, both in Emma's "hard"
deliberations denying any consciousness beyond death and in Hardy's stern
refusal to flinch from the space that separated them even when Emma was
alive. But the calm, evenly pitched movements of its verse make the
bitterness easier to stand.
and considers how she, if living, would have
This leads him to remember, with a touching romanticism, her past actions
to avoid being drenched in a summer shower. He concludes by imagining
the grass and flowers that will grow not simply on the ground above her,
but actually from her, who loved the natural world
In this poem, despite its bleak title and harsh beginning, Hardy is able
to see a kind of substantive continuance past death, but-- more to the
point-- he is able to move backward into memory, and then to bring that
almost humorous memory forward into a new, and much lighter and more
accepting, rumination upon death.
"Poems of 1912-13" should be much more widely known, especially
among poets who wish to learn how to craft the raw material of their
emotions into "poems", instead of mere vignettes cast in flat prosy
lines. I would like to see a day when these mostly marvelous poems are
set to music-- as so many of Heinrich Heine's poems have been-- and I
would like to end this essay by suggesting that readers looking to study
the most powerful twentieth century evocation of "negative" emotions
abandon "The Waste Land" and look instead to this sequence.
Cooper Renner also reviews books and engages in various critical activities for the
online magazine 'elimae', under the name b. renner. He is a published poet and a very eclectic fellow.
from "Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries" [London: Macmillan,1914]
The '90's trend of poets' memoirs ("The Liars' Club", "Dakota", "Heaven's
Coast") is a not unnatural outgrowth of the narcissism of the '80's and
(of course) the confessionalist plague that attacked American poetry
years ago, though one suspects that Robert Lowell would be, and W. D.
Snodgrass is, appalled at the fruit their erstwhile examples have born.
(Anne Sexton, on the other hand, might be somewhere applauding.) When
the soul-baring psychology behind confessionalism wed itself to American
plain speech poetics in the '70's, it was inevitable-- I believe-- that
verse which read very much like prose would eventually become prose
altogether. That some of these memoirs have come from poets virtually
unknown outside poetic circles and have sold far more copies than can
have been due to the poets' prior reputations creates the interesting
possibility of poets who are known not for their poetry-- even of the
self-dissecting kind-- but rather for their willingness to air their
private lives in public. This situation is not dissimilar to that of
such celebrities as Zsa Zsa Gabor-- people who are "known" for being
known, rather than for any concrete accomplishment.
The saddest aspect of all of this is that-- if the poets in
question had been more devoted to poetry as an art form rather than as a
psychological exercise, more widely read in the traditions of English
language poetry, and less willing to follow in the footsteps of their
increasingly more revealing (psychically) and increasingly more boring
(linguistically and literarily) predecessors-- they might have known that
there were other ways to deal with the emotional complexities and traumas
that attend almost any human life. They might, for example, have read
Thomas Hardy's "Poems of 1912-13."
And that, of course, is one of
the "secrets" of creating a truly remarkable poem-- utilizing one's own
feelings in such a masterly way as to speak to many related kinds of
emotional contexts.
The best poems of the sequence-- the most musical, the most
vividly imagistic, the most involving-- are three spoken by "Hardy" and
one spoken by the deceased "Emma," though her name, like Hardy's, nowhere
appears in the poems. Such reticence is typical of Hardy, as is his
decision to name the grouping flatly and mechanistically, rather than
with some florid allusion (*All My Pretty Ones*, anyone?). Likewise the
opening poem-- and one of the best-- is simply entitled "The Going."
Why did you give no hint that night
(Hardy begins by asking)
That quickly after the morrow's dawn
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here, up and be gone [. . . ?]
Hardy, who insists in poem after
poem upon the finality of death, nonetheless imagines the ghost of Emma
shadowing him ...
. . . up and be gone
Where I could not follow
With wing of swallow. . . .
He follows "The Going" with "Your Last Drive," a poem which I
cannot help but think must have been an indirect, if not direct,
inspiration for one of the most famous of W. S. Merwin's poems, "On the
Anniversary of My Death." Here Hardy mourns, not the date of Emma's
death, but the fact that on her last drive she passed the place where she
would soon be "resting in peace"-- without, of course, knowing it. He
imagines that, if he had taken that ride with her, a sort of writing
would have shown on her face, a message of what was about to be, though
neither he nor she would have been aware of it.
"I go hence soon to my resting-place;
How many times you visit me there
Or what your thoughts are, or if you go
There never at all. And I shall not care."
In "Rain on a Grave" he contemplates Emma's resting place again,
this time during a downpour. He anthropomorphizes the rain clouds which
spout upon her
Their waters amain
In ruthless disdain
shivered with pain
As at touch of dishonour
If there had lit on her
So coldly, so straightly
Such arrows of rain.
beyond measure
With a child's pleasure
All her life's round.
The fourth of the strongest poems in the sequence, "The Haunter,"
gives its entirety into Emma's voice. Hardy, who insists in poem after
poem upon the finality of death, nonetheless imagines the ghost of Emma
shadowing him-- almost like a guardian angel-- listening to the words he
speaks to her who is gone, traveling wherever "his fancy sets him
wandering," including "places / Only dreamers know." Perhaps most
remarkable is the engaging, and heartbreaking, sweetness of Emma's care,
the lack of anger or bitterness at their difficult marriage, the
tenderness of her solicitation. And just as Hardy had noted her love of
nature in "Rain on a Grave," here she takes the time to mention the "shy
hares" and night rooks that live where dreamers go. There is, for me, an
irresistible aura to this poem that suggests over and over the "spirit"
most of us imagine Emily Dickinson to have been, and I cannot help but
wonder if Hardy had read any of the early editions of her work.
"Poems of 1912-13" should be much more widely known, especially
among poets who wish to learn how to craft the raw material of their
emotions into "poems", instead of mere vignettes cast in flat prosy
lines.
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