Six Poets: Thomas Hardy

I first heard of Alan Bennett when he was one of the quartet of wits (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller) who made up Beyond the Fringe. Only later I learned of his renown as a playwright. In 2014, Faber & Faber published a book of his called Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin, An Anthology. Bennett's six poets are Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Philip Larkin. It was clearly a personal selection, rather idiosyncratic, and limited to Brits, and not trying to be scholarly or comprehensive or even prescriptive.

While it's tempting to quibble with Bennett's choices (Louis MacNeice?), if I were to compile such an anthology, I would keep two of his poets (Hardy and Larkin) and add four of my own choosing: Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop. I will devote a piece to each of them in the coming weeks.

Randall Jarrell claimed that poets are people who run outdoors during thunderstorms hoping to get hit by lightning. If they are struck a few times in their lives they are genuine poets. If they are struck several times they are great. Everyone interested in poetry has his or her own way of telling the real thing from the fake. Housman told a friend that he couldn't think of a poem while he was shaving because it made his whiskers stand on end and he couldn't get a good shave. Some invoke the hairs on their forearms or on the back of their necks standing edgewise. It is always something like this - an uncanny feeling, like terror, comes over you. Robert Graves went so far as to identify it as the unmistakable presence of his White Goddess.



1. Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) 

Though he studied to be an architect, Thomas Hardy was a lifelong poet. He even dictated a poem to his second wife from his deathbed. He wrote novels to make a living, but he didn't publish his first book of poems, Wessex Poems and Other Verses, until 1898, after the outraged reception of his last two novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure made him decide to give up novel writing altogether. He was clearly in the habit of writing poetry, of finding occasions to put thoughts and feelings down in verse. That he maintained, over more than sixty years of writing poems, such a high degree of quality is amazing in itself.

But it is commonly believed that his work took on a higher quality and a greater sense urgency upon the death of his first wife, Emma. He then wrote, in Poems of 1912-13, a series of poems that are imbued with a powerful grief and regret. His marriage to Emma, which lasted thirty-eight years, was marked by an estrangement before her death, which caused Hardy greater pain when he looked back on the course of his love for her. Here is a poem from that period. 

THE VOICE

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear?
Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

     Thus I; faltering forward,
     Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
     And the woman calling.

December 1912.


Hardy isn't telling us a ghost story, as in Wuthering Heights. He is haunted by thoughts of his wife, that make him feel her presence, but he is writing about the dead. He feels that her death is a direct challenge to his continued existence. Emma's death was not Hardy's first encounter with death, but it made him think about his own death for the first time, which hers seemed to directly foretell. In several poems, Hardy is reminded, again and again, that his place is with her in the grave. In another poem from the period, "Something Tapped," Hardy hears a tapping at the window and thinks that he sees "my weary Belovèd's face," berating him that she has waited in vain for so long for him to join her in the grave. Some have mistaken this concentration on death as "gothic" - a term that Hardy knew from his studies in English architecture, not as a popular genre of horror fiction. Again, Hardy wrote of someone he knew who had died and with whose absence he was obsessed. But unlike Miss Kenton in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, we never have to guess whether someone is seeing ghosts or is merely hallucinating. Emma is unambiguously dead. The voice that Hardy hears, the visions he sees, the presence he feels, are all in his mind - and he cannot get them out.

There is a haiku by the 17th century poet Basho that captures the same tone:

The piercing chill I feel/ my dead wife’s comb, in our bedroom/ under my heel

There is the physical pain of the comb's "teeth" digging into his foot, and the existential pain of the sudden remembrance of his wife. 

Hardy's plans to join Emma after his death were frustrated by well-meaning people who wanted to secure his legacy. He had left instructions that his body should be placed beside Emma in Stinsford churchyard where she was buried. However, his executor insisted that Hardy be buried in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. A compromise was reached whereby Hardy's heart was removed from his body prior to cremation. The heart was buried with Emma, and his ashes enshrined in Westminster. While somewhat poetic, I somehow doubt that Hardy would've been satisfied with his executor's solution.