Hardy and Wordsworth

Transcription

Hardy and Wordsworth
Author(s): Dennis Taylor
Source: Victorian Poetry, Vol. 24, No. 4, Wordsworth among the Victorian Poets (Winter,
1986), pp. 441-454
Published by: West Virginia University Press
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Hardy
and
Wordsworth
DENNIS TAYLOR
was thoroughly immersed in Wordsworth and the Wordsworthian tradition. Peter Casagrande has listed over 60 explicit
allusions to Wordsworth in Hardy's novels and other prose writings.1
Casagrandehas also noted that in two collected editions of Wordsworth's
works, Hardy marks over thirty poems (including 31 marked sometime
between 1864 and 1873), along with Wordsworth's "Preface." Casagrande
misses little, but to his list should be added the following items. Hardy's
early poetical notebook, "Studies, Specimens, &c," contains quotations
from Wordsworth's The Excursion.2 In his copy of Palgrave's Golden
Treasury,probably the first vehicle through which Hardy came to know
Wordsworth well, Hardy marked the "Intimations" Ode and "Ruth";
where Palgrave wrote in his Preface, "narrative, descriptive, and didactic
poems . . . have been excluded," Hardy penciled in the margin:"not so: vide
the Wordsworth poems." In 1920-21, Hardy reportedly said: "Wordsworth, you know, tried to arrange his poems into classes, but it was not
successful"; also, "Blake is a poet who benefits by selections- like
Wordsworth."3
I
A comprehensive list of Hardy's poetic debts to Wordsworthhas never
been compiled. The following connections, all taken from Palgrave and
poems marked by Hardy in his collected editions, are specific enough to
constitute plausible debts. One must caution, however, that Wordsworthis
so pervasive an influence that he cannot be confined to specific parallelsand
^'Hardy's Wordsworth:A Record and a Commentary,"ELT, 20 (1977), 210-237.
2Michael Millgate, ThomasHardy: A Biography(Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 87.
3VereCollins, Talkswith ThomasHardy at Max Gate, 1920-22 (London, 1928), pp. 20, 67. In
his copy of the GoldenTreasury,Hardy underlines in the "Intimations" Ode: "Which" in line
151 ("Which, be they what they may") and "Uphold us, cherish" in line 154. In the margin, he
then writes: "i.e. - 'and which uphold' etc." In "Ruth," Hardy puts double lines in the margin
next to lines 238-239: "And there she begs at one steep place / Where up and down with easy
pace."
441
442 / VICTORIANPOETRY
contrasts; by the time Wordsworthianism had reached Hardy, it had
blended with a thousand poetic notes which complement most of the
parallels cited below.
Hardy's basic sense of what the poet does, his notion of himself as an
observer and recorder of his "unadjusted impressions"4is fundamentally
Wordsworthian. "He was a man who used to notice such things," he writes
in "Afterwards" (511), a poem which draws upon Wordsworth's "A Poet's
Epitaph," and also the two lines Hardy marked in Wordsworth's "To the
Daisy": "The homely sympathy that heeds / The common life, our nature
breeds." Even where Hardy disagreed with Wordsworth, he did so in
Wordsworthianterms: "The mission of poetry is to record impressions, not
convictions. Wordsworthin his later writings fell into the errorof recording
the latter."5Wordsworth's conception of Lucy in a poem like "Three years
she grew" is like Hardy's conception of Emma in "Rain on a Grave" (280)
and "I Found Her Out There" (281). "A slumber did my spirit seal" is
reflected in Hardy's "While Drawing in a Churchyard"(491) and "Proud
Songsters" (816) with its conclusion: "And earth, and air, and rain." Wordsworth's "She was a Phantom of delight," "To a Highland Girl," and "The
Solitary Reaper"can also be connected with Hardy's "The Phantom Horsewoman" (294), "On Stinsford Hill at Midnight" (550), and "The Singing
Woman" (605). Wordsworth's"There is a Flower, the lesser Celandine"lies
behind Hardy's "The Last Chrysanthemum" (118) and other creature
(birds, flowers, animals) poems. Wordsworth's "The Reverie of Poor
Susan" may be heard in Hardy's "Dream of the City Shopwoman" (565).
The Wordsworthiansonnet form, with its octave abbaacca, is used by
Hardy in ten sonnets: "At a Bridal" (6), "The Schreckhorn"(264), "In the
Old Theatre, Fiesole" (67), and those mentioned below. Hardy's earliest
sonnets are mostly Shakespearean and Petrarchan;when in the 1890s he
returned to poetry (and soon to The Dynasts), he wrote the balance of his
Wordsworthian sonnets. Indeed, the description of George Somerset in A
Laodiceanis prophetic self-description:"For two whole yearshe did nothing
but write verse in every conceivable metre, and on every conceivable subject,
from Wordsworthian sonnets on the singing of his tea-kettle to epic fragments on the Fall of Empires" (I, i). Hardy's war sonnets, especially
"Embarcation" (54), "On the Belgian Expatriation" (496), "In Time of
Wars and Tumults" (499), "A Call to National Service" (505), all in
Wordsworthian schemes, may have been influenced in particular by the
political sonnets, "It is not to be thought of that the Flood," "One might
4Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (London, 1976), p. 84. All
references to Hardy's poems are to this edition, by poem number.
5FlorenceEmily Hardy, TheLife of ThomasHardy 1840-1928 (London, 1962), pp. 377-378.
DENNIS TAYLOR/ 443
believe," "Subjugation of Switzerland," and "On the Extinction of the
Venetian Republic." The specific rhyme scheme of Wordsworth's "These
times strike monied worldlings" is used in Hardy's "Departure" (55); the
rhyme scheme of Wordsworth'ssonnet on the sonnet, "Though narrowbe,"
is used in Hardy's "Zermatt:To the Matterhorn"(73); the rhyme scheme of
Wordsworth's "It is a beauteous evening" and "Mutability" is used in
Hardy's "To a Lady" (41).
Several Hardy poems seem to parody and reverse Wordsworth's
poems. Wordsworth's "Lines written in Early Spring" is reversed by
Hardy's "In a Wood" (40): "Since, then, no grace I find / Taught me of
trees, / Turn I back to my kind." "Most sweet it is with unuplifted Eyes" is
reversed by Hardy's "The Rambler" (221): "I do not see the hills around, /
Nor markthe tints the copses wear." "Lucy Gray," which ends, "Yet some
maintainthat to this day / She is a living child," is reversedby Hardy's "The
Bird-Catcher's Boy" (809), which ends: "And the tide washed ashore/ One
sailor boy." Hardy's "From Her in the Country" (187) and "The
Milkmaid" are specifically anti-Wordsworthian parodies: "Nay! Phyllis
does not dwell / On visual and familiar things like these" (126). Wordsworth's pious ending of "Ruth" ("For thee a funeralbell shall ring, / And all
the congregation sing / A Christian psalm for thee") is mocked by Hardy's
"The Rash Bride" (212), with its obtuse ending: "We sang the Ninetieth
Psalm to her- set to Saint Stephen's tune." "The Impercipient" (44)
parodies Wordworth's "Intimations" Ode:
I am like a gazer who should mark
An inland company
Standing upfmgered, with, 'Hark,! hark!
The glorious distant sea!'
And feel, 'Alas, 'tis but yon dark
And wind-swept pine to me!'
Images from Wordsworth's "Intimations" Ode, which Hardy quoted again
and again in novel and essay, abound also in "Nature's Questioning" (43):
When I look forth at dawning, pool,
Field, flock, and lonely tree,
All seem to gaze at me
Like chastened children sitting silent in a school.
The Wordsworthian children have by now become "cowed" by "the
master's ways" and can barely speak, except "in lippings mere." The
"Immortality" which broods over Wordsworth's child like "a Master o'er a
Slave" has become in Hardy an obscure constraining force.
What is difficult to determine precisely is how Hardy complements or
refutes Wordsworth. Hardy's negative images themselves find parallels in
Wordsworth's poems. The shades of the "prison-house" closing upon the
children in the "Intimations" Ode forecast Hardy's children "cowed . . . till
their early zest was overborne." "The Impercipient" follows Wordsworth's
444 / VICTORIAN
POETRY
own darkerintimation: "- But there's a Tree, of many, one, / A single Field
which I have looked upon, / Both of them speak of something that is gone."
Hardy thought of his poems as Wordsworthian"questionings" ("Apology"
to Late LyricsandEarlier). Wordsworth's"Mutability" sonnet accordswith
Hardy's vision; he marked the last four lines which compare the "outward
forms" of truth to a "tower sublime" unable to sustain "the unimaginable
touch of Time."
To sort out the meaning of Hardy's relation to Wordsworth, we must
turn to the largertradition of the romantic lyric and romantic sensibility, as
they developed out of earlier traditions. "It bridges over the years," Hardy
said, "to think that Gray might have seen Wordsworth in his cradle, and
Wordsworth might have seen me in mine" (Life, p. 386).
II
In his classic account of the "Greater Romantic Lyric," M. H. Abrams
describes what happened to the traditional nature-meditation poem as it
came under romantic influences.6The traditionalstructure, as described by
Louis Martz, was roughly: a) composition of place or posing of a theme, b)
analysis and application, c) resolution and colloquy with God. The "greater
romantic lyric," typified in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight," took this three-part structure and changed it
to: a) the location of the speaker in a particularized physical scene, b)
personal memory and reflection , c) deepened understanding or colloquy,
often with a return to the physical scene. Hardy alludes to the tradition in a
comment he made to his friend, Sir George Douglas, when he said that
Douglas' poems reminded him "of a meditativeman walkingabout his fields
& hills, & writing down what is suggested by the natural objects before his
eyes- their relations to mankind & the like: a sort of Thomson's Seasons
with the added force of all the modern spirit we have acquired since
Thomson's day."7 What the romantic spirit has done with Thomson's
6M. H. Abrams, "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric," inFrom Sensibilityto
Romanticism,eds. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 550.
7The CollectedLetters of ThomasHardy, eds. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate
(Oxford, 1978-85), 1, 182-183. Hardy's mention of Gray and Turner loosely parallelsthe way
Abrams places these figures. For Abrams, a kind of transition between the SeventeenthCentury and romantic lyric is Thomson's Seasons(p. 534). A more immediate forerunnerof the
romantic lyric is Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" (p. 538), a poem which
Hardy loved and annotated in Palgrave. In his copy of Thomson's Poetical Works,now in the
Dorchester County Museum, Hardy makes the following connections between Thomson and
Gray. In Thomson's "Autumn," Hardy marksline 15 ("While listening senates hang upon thy
1751." He also marksline
tongue") and writes a note: "written about 1727- imitated by Gray
212 ("And breathesits balmy fragranceo'er the wild") and writes:" 'And waste its sweetness on
the desert air'. Gray"
DENNIS TAYLOR / 445
"omnibus of unlocalized description, episodic narration, and general
reflection" (in Abrams'account) is integratethem more organicallywith the
specific nature of the present scene.
Hardy responded wholeheartedly to this meditative structure, and
brought the Thomson-Gray-Wordsworth tradition to a lyric completion
consistent with "the modern spirit we have acquiredsince Thomson's day."
His poetry can representa third great stage of the English meditative lyric, a
Victorianresolution. At the same time, it is so consistent with Wordsworth's
premises that it seems their naturaldevelopment. For Hardy, as for Wordsworth, the mind is intimately dependent on the workings of the natural
world, and the structure of the poem reflects that dependency. But for
Wordsworth, the lyric meditative process results in a harmony and
integration of mind and setting. Its ideal is, in Coleridge's terms, "a sweet
and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world"
(Abrams,p. 544). For Hardy that same process results in a jarringdiscord of
mind and world. Hardy's world, like Wordsworth's, conditions and molds
the mind, but also prepares in secret for the shock of dissolution.
Such discord and shock is already potentially present in much of
Wordsworth's poetry. A dramaticexample is "Strange fits of passion," the
subject of a famous analysis by Geoffrey Hartman. The poem influences
Hardy's many lover's-journey poems, including "My Cicely" (31), "The
Well-Beloved" (96), "The Dream-Follower" (108), "The Revisitation"
(152), and thereafterPoemsof 1912-13; also "The Widow Betrothed" (106),
about which Hardy wrote: "It must have been written after I had read
Wordsworth's famous preface to Lyrical Ballads, which influenced me
much, & influences the style of the poem" (CollectedLetters, V, 253).
Wordsworth's lover's reverie takes shape under the gentle influence of the
natural setting: "And all the while my eyes I kept / On the descending
moon." But the result, in this poem at least, is an odd turn, a sudden thought
suggesting some hidden disharmony:
My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.
What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover's head!
"O mercy!" to myself I cried,
"If Lucy should be dead!" (11.19-28)
The poem shows that the Wordsworthianmind follows a momentum which
can as easily put it out of touch with the setting as in tune with it. The
waywardness of this divergence suggests a more fatal divergence of the
human and the natural,as though the smallerinterruptionportendeda more
serious one. This suggestion is made explicit in Wordsworth's original
conclusion to the poem:
I told her this: her laughter light
Is ringing in my ears;
And when I think upon that night
My eyes are dim with tears.
This is the conclusion which Hardy would have written, but which Wordsworth cancelled- a dramatic example of Wordsworth's fighting off his
influential descendent, and of Hardy occupying his lyric source. One might
even vary Harold Bloom's comment, inserting "Wordsworth"for "Shelley"
that Hardy's poetry "makesus read much of [Wordsworth]as though Hardy
were [Wordsworth's] ancestor, the dark father whom the revolutionary
idealist failed to cast out."8In cancelling the conclusion, Wordsworthleaves
us with only an intimation of a mind/nature split, which Hardy will make
explicit. The great Wordsworthian hope, of course, is to make the mind's
stream of consciousness somehow open and adequate to a world in flux, so
that consciousness is not subject to some fatal interruption, but is at once
inside and outside the world, determined but free. Hardy takes the romantic
paradoxand develops it into a linear contradiction:where we are inside and
determined is not where we are outside and free. The ultimate Wordsworthian conclusion for Hardy is inevitably "Self-Unconscious" (270):
"Watching shapes that reveries limn . . . seldom he / Had eyes to see / The
moment that encompassed him." The intimationof truly free awareness,the
"obstinate questionings / Of sense and outward things, / Fallings from us,
vanishings" come only for Hardy in the shock of an interruption of the
stream of consciousness.
What Hardy remains fascinated by is the lyric plot, the way it evolves
into spell-binding vision, and where the returnto the scene does not suggest
a final harmony of mind and nature, but a jarringcollision. The meditation
follows its own momentum, while nature diverges from it, until the two
collide like the Titanic and the iceberg. "During Wind and Rain" (441)
develops inexorably out of the Wordsworthiantradition. Many of Hardy's
most moving poems evolve toward a final vision, unearthed out of the
surrounding scene, like Wordsworth's "voiceless form" (see below), and
then juxtaposed with a changing world. "The Voice" (285) ends with the
image of "the woman calling," while the speakeris left "falteringforward,/
Leaves around me falling." The "unity of being," which the seventeenthcentury lyric and the Wordsworthian lyric suggest in different ways, is
fractured by Hardy's development of their structure.
*AMap of Misreading(Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 23.
DENNIS TAYLOR/ 447
One oddity in Abrams' definition of the "greater"romantic structure,
setting/memory/setting, is that many romantic lyrics do not return to the
setting; their structure is only: setting/memory. Presumablysuch lyrics are
only subsets of the greater lyric; in them, the circle, symbolized in the
"ouroboros"(Abrams,p. 532), is not completed. This incomplete circle was
the element of the Wordsworthianstructure that Hardy most responded to.
He loved in particular "The Two April Mornings" with its final vision of
Matthew standing "with a bough / Of wilding in his hand"; he loved even
more what he saw as Frederick Locker's adaptationof this Wordsworthian
poem (Life, p. 133) in "The Old Stone-Mason," especially its last verse:
We had sought shelter from the storm,
And saw this lowly Pair,But none could see a Shining Form
That watched beside them there.
The Wordsworthian hope, conventionalized in Locker, is that these
memorial conclusions refind the past in the present, and achieve an eternal
spot of time in the here and now. There is a single-mindedness about Hardy
refusing this finessing of the past into the present. For Hardy, memory
remains a dissociating phenomenon, a sign of the mind torn between what it
once was and what it has become. Hardy's many ballads, narrative,lyrical,
and personal, articulatethe strains of the Wordsworthianballad;in these we
can trace a process whereby Hardy identifies more closely with his memoryobsessed speakers until he enters into his own ballads and lives out their
memorial reveries:
Yet at midnight if here walking,
When the moon sheets wall and tree,
I see forms of old time talking,
Who smile on me. (156)9
This ambiguity of the romantic ending, which can return to the initial
setting or remain within a memory, can be seen in "Domicilium" (1), which
Hardy's Life describes as "Wordsworthianlines- the earliest discoverable
of young Hardy's attempts in verse" (p. 4).10The poem is remarkablein
9Alsosee Taylor, Hardy's Poetry, 1860-1928 (London, 1981), pp. 93-97 on Hardy's ballads,
and passim, on Hardy's meditative structure. To Casagrande'sadmittedly partial account of
critics who discuss Wordsworthand Hardy should at least be added David Perkins'"Hardy and
the Poetry of Isolation," ELH, 26 (1959), 253-270. Perkins has good remarkson the disabling
power of memory, separated in Hardy from romantic visionary supports. Perkins also
emphasizes how Hardy's "obsessive attention to the whole context of experience" separates
him from the romantic imagination;but we can now see, post-Abrams and Hartman, how the
romantic meditative structure itelf leads Hardy into his distinctive version.
10Casagrandesuggests that "Domicilium" may be, at least in part, a late Hardy poem. It is
indeed true that Hardy returnedto a sort of Wordsworthianpastoralpoetry in his late years:see
"Indian Summer: Hardy's Pastoral Poetry," in Taylor, Hardy ysPoetry, 1860-1928, 139-155.
However, in the Life Hardy labels "Domicilium" as "written between 1857 and 1860"; such
dating by Hardy is rarely misleading, as I hope to show in a study of his dating practices.
448 / VICTORIAN
POETRY
showing how thoroughly Hardy incorporated Wordworth's descriptive
meditative language. The poem draws on the descriptive blank verse of
"Tintern Abbey" and TheExcursion,Book I. The blank verse meter twines
itself through the syntax, so that the mind speaking to itself seems to travel
with the sweep of the beech trees:
It faces west, and round the back and sides
High beeches, bending, hang a veil of boughs,
And sweep against the roof.
The viewer's eye goes round and up and over and down upon the house, as
though the mind could be equal to the physical scene, making "the external
internal, the internal external" (Abrams, p. 550). Next, the view moves
outward from the house, and on to the "distant hills and sky," then round
behind the house and out to the heath. Then the view moves back in
historical time:
An oak uprises, springing from a seed
Dropped by some bird a hundred years ago.
"In days bygone," the poem continues, leading us into the speaker's
personal memory of his deceased grandmother, and finally into a memory
within a memory: the grandmother'srecollection of a wilder less cultivated
world where the passer-by was obscured by trees and bats flew through the
bedrooms. She speaks:
Heathcroppers
Lived on the hills, and were our only friends;
So wild it was when first we settled here.
For such a young poet, "Domicilium" is an accomplished exercise. But
the poem seems to stop, rather than end. There is no concluding return to
the opening scene or to the present reality of the speaker. The last word,
"here," is strangely jarring,because the "here" of the grandmotherhas long
ceased to exist. The next poem in TheCollectedPoems,"The Temporarythe
All," is so entirely different in tone, language, and meter, that we might
assume Hardy's Wordsworthianism had been destroyed, perhaps by his
experience in London in the 1860s. Was "Domicilium" unfinished or
interrupted?Whateverthe answer, the uncertainty of the ending reflects an
ambiguity in the Wordsworthian structure: we are kept waiting for some
resolution of past and present selves which never occurs.
"The Darkling Thrush" (119) reflects the ambiguity of the Wordsworthian ending in a more deliberate way. Hardy specifically connects the
poem with some Wordsworthian sources. "And I can listen to thee yet"
from Wordsworth's "To the Cuckoo" becomes in Hardy's "The Darkling
Thrush" the past conditional of his conclusion: "I could think." In a place
DENNIS TAYLOR / 449
where "every spirit upon earth / Seemed fervourless as I," Hardy hears an
aged thrush sing "a full-hearted evensong / Of joy illimited":
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrialthings
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
Compare Wordsworth's conclusion:
O blessed Bird! the earth we pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial, faery place;
That is fit home for Thee!
In Hardy's poem as in Wordsworth's, there is the same surprisingadvent of
the bird, the same orchestra of nature, though Hardy adverts to a changing
scene going its own way ("Upon the growing gloom"). In "The Green
Linnet," another source of "The Darkling Thrush," Wordsworth plays
with the separation of the visionary form from its earthly embodiment, as
though the separationwere a natural result of perception. The linnet:
Pours forth his song in gushes;
As if by that exulting strain
He mocked and treated with disdain
The voiceless Form he chose to feign,
While fluttering in the bushes.
Wordsworth's"To a Sky-Lark"("EtherealMinstrel") formalizesthe vision
even more:
A privacy of glorious light is thine;
Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine;
Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!
And in Wordsworth's "To a Sky-Lark" ("Up with me!"), the conclusion is
even more markedly Christian:
But hearing thee, or others of thy kind,
As full of gladness and as free of heaven,
I, with my fate contented, will plod on,
And hope for higher raptures, when life's day is done.
Here Wordsworthstraddlesthe seventeenth-century and romanticforms of
lyric meditation, relying on the former for a weight of moral and allegorical
reflection while holding on to the scenic structure of the latter. Indeed,
Wordsworth in his later career increasingly tends toward a traditional
structure and theology which will support the harmony he seeks. The
POETRY
450 / VICTORIAN
romantic meditative moment may not be "blind," but it is extremely
precarious:the poem, which claims to model a present interaction of mind
and world, is a past event. Thus, there is enormous pressure placed on the
romantic verb tense, which is often an ambiguous amalgamof present tense,
past tense, and timeless present tense: "Behold her, single in the field. / . . .
the Maiden sang, / As if her song could have no ending." The poet's
experience is ambiguously something that took place in the past, and
something that takes place now: "A poet could not but be gay, / In such a
jocund company."
The ending of "The Darkling Thrush," "I could think," is extraordinarily rich because it deconstructs the Wordsworthian "poet could not but
be gay" into its various competing parts. (There is nothing for Hardy that
holds them together.) Hardy's "could" means a number of competing
things:
a) I could think then, and have continued to.
I could think then, and have not continued to.
I could think then, and may or may not have continued to.
b) I could have thought then, and I did.
I could have thought then, but I didn't really.
I could have thought then, but it was only a temporary fancy.
c) I could think now, but did not then.
I could think now, but did not then, and don't really now.
Whenever the speaker"could think," what he could think is also extremely
unclear. The entity "blessed Hope," deduced as seen only by a bird, is about
as rarefied a possibility as one can imagine, the last frail attenuated hope of
the romantic meditation. "The Darkling Thrush," Hardy said, was a "poem
on the Century's End" (Life, p. 307).
Ill
Thus, Hardy was extremely responsive to Wordsworth and extremely
critical of him. He also brings the Wordsworthian lyric to remarkably
un-Wordsworthian conclusions in language and meter. If Wordsworth
seeks a real language of men responsive to the present setting, Hardy often
renders an obsolete language of men that has long ago grown out of touch
with the present setting. The speakerof Hardy's "My Cicely" says: "And I
leapt in my wonder, / Was faint of my joyance." The poem illustrates,
almost defiantly, Hardy's correcting of Wordsworth's notion that "the
language of common speech" applies to all forms of poetry. Hardy insisted
against Wordsworth that as "passionate" poetry becomes "sentimental"
DENNIS TAYLOR / 451
and then "meditative" and finally "fanciful," common speech gradually
gives way to "poetic diction" (Lifeyp. 306). The New Critics associated
Hardy's toughened speech with a return to seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry. Again, we must see Hardy as following a post-Wordsworthian model. The Wordsworthianlanguage of common speech evolves
into an artificial and obsolete diction which time inexorably leaves behind:
There once complained a goosequill pen
To the scribe of the Infinite
Of the words it had to write
Because they were past its ken. (473)
The meditative mind cannot turn back on itself; what it has written keeps
receding. Like the torn parts of a letter, the time-bound poet's harmony of
language and world cannot be reassembled:
But some, alas, of those I threw
Were past my search, destroyed for ever:
They were your name and place; and never
Did I regain those clues to you. (256)
In another poem on his grandmother, Hardy says of her, that "She seemed
one left behind of a band gone distant / So far that no tongue could hail"
(227). It is not only past experience that can never be recaptured. Even a
present experience is potentially forestalled by the forms through which the
experience is channelled:
But there was a new afflationAn aura zephyring round
That care infected not:
It came as a salutation,
And, in my sweet astound,
I scarcely witted what
Might pend,
I scarcely witted what. (571)
The language thrusts its difference into the sameness, and the stanza form
continues as a monument to a Wordsworthian experience undergone an
astonishing transmutation.
One of the assumptions behind Wordsworthianprosody is a mimetic
one, that through meter and rhythm the poem can model the interactionof
mind and world. Interestingly, Hardy after "Domicilium" refuses, except in
"Panthera" (234), to use Wordsworthian blank verse in his short poems.
Where Wordsworthwrites a blank verse mirroringa present flexible movement of mind, Hardy writes a formal meter representing the last stage of a
mental movement that has long ceased to exist. He is committed to the
stanza form whose complexity is needed for him to develop his version of
Wordsworthian mimesis. He insisted, in notes he made on Wordsworth's
"Preface," that "poetry is also artistry" (Casagrande, p. 221); but the
artistries "of rhyme & rhythm," which Hardy emphasized, are developments, not overturnings, of Wordsworth's notion. In poem after poem
Hardy creates elaborate, pointedly artificial stanza forms that imitate the
interaction of the mind with the physical scene. For example, the stanza
form of "At Castle Boterel" (292), another version of "Tintern Abbey,"
suggests the intertwining of the speaker'sreflections first with the rhythms
of his journeyand then with the shape of his vision. That vision is affectedby
the rain, and the stanza form suggests a brief watery outline which quickly
evaporates:
I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love's domain
Never again.
The stanza form must be artificial, for it outlines a fading phantom figure
imprinted on a mind seeing it "too late." The final vision of Wordsworth's
"The Solitary Reaper" ("I saw her singing at her work, / And o'er the sickle
bending") evolves into the artful complex stanzaform of "The Figure in the
Scene" (416), a figuring of what is no more. The stanza shape itself is like an
outline of rain:
And thus I drew her there alone,
Seated amid the gauze
Of moisture, hooded, only her outline shown,
With rainfall marked across.
- Soon passed our stay;
Yet her rainy form is the Genius still of the spot,
Immutable, yea,
Though the place now knows her no more, and has known her not
Ever since that day.
Similarly, the final auralmemory of "The Solitary Reaper" ("The music in
my heart I bore, / Long after it was heard no more") evolves into the stanza
form of "To My Father's Violin" (381), here a mimesis of a musical rhythm
which is imaged in the visual complexity of the stanza, a last relic of a faded
music:
He must do without you now,
Stir you no more anyhow
To yearning concords taught you in your glory;
While, your strings a tangled wreck,
Once smart drawn,
Ten worm-wounds in your neck,
Purflings wan
With dust-hoar, here alone I sadly con
Your present dumbness, shape your olden story.
The interpenetrationof mind with world, mind with rain, mind with music,
mind with firelight (as in "Logs on the Hearth" [433]), is rendered in the
movement of the voice and eye over the stanza form. "In the Seventies"
(389) evokes Wordsworth's"Stepping Westward,"about the poet in pursuit
DENNIS TAYLOR/ 453
of a vision, and makesthe journey rhythms evolve into a final lockstep form,
in which the mind is enclosed:
In the seventies nought could darken or destroy it,
Locked in me,
Though as delicate as lamp-worm's lucency;
Neither mist nor murk could weaken or alloy it
In the seventies!- could not darken or destroy it,
Locked in me.
The word, "could," is a stiff and fading relic of the Wordsworthiansurmise,
as in "I could think" from "The Darkling Thrush."
Hardy's modified Wordsworthianism influences his renderingof small
perceptions, where even here we see the dramaof reverie, interruption,and
belated vision:
The snow-feathers so gently swoop that though
But half an hour ago
The road was brown, and now is starkly white,
A watcher would have failed defining quite
When it transformed it so. (702)
What needs to be emphasized is how Hardy's peculiarities of syntax and
word choice evolve naturallyout of Wordsworth'sinfluence. The last line is
a not untypical Hardy tangle. What transformswhat? The snow transforms
the road? But "snow-feathers" is plural. Does the "road," the impersonal
noun most proximate, transform itself? Or is the last line an impersonal
construction: a transformationtook place in the watcher's perception? The
syntax perplexes the relation of mind and world, ratherthan blending them
in the Wordsworthianmanner. "It transformed it so" may recall the slight
obscurity of "Domicilium" in its first line: "It faces west."
The conflicting relation of mind and world in Hardy becomes in "An
August Midnight" (1 13) a literal collision. The Wordsworthianmeditatoris
at his desk, pen in hand, while the summer bugs come through the window:
- My guests besmear my new-penned line,
Or bang at the lamp and fall supine.
'God's humblest, they!' I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.
The meditation has been reduced to writing, but a writing which can be
interrupted by a real world: bugs banging against the reading lamp and
smearing the poet's ink. The momentum of this late Wordsworthian
meditation puts us in another syntactic tangle: they know Earth-secretsthat
I do not know, they know Earth-secrets that know not me. Either way his
language leaves him outside while, as a living creature, he is blindly inside.
Hardy thus makes naturalisticcomedy of a passage he copied from Arnold's
454 / VICTORIAN
POETRY
essay on Wordsworth: "It might seem that Nature not only gave him the
matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him."11
Hardy quoted from an article on Turner: "An artist must be able to
persuade himself either that he is carrying to completion something begun
by his forerunner, or that it is his to denounce the fraud of his predecessors,
& to discover afresh the secret of art" {LiteraryNotebooks,II, 71). Hardy
carried Wordsworth to a unique completion, a Victorian conclusion of the
greater romantic lyric.
11Hardy, LiteraryNotebooks,ed. Lennart Bjork,2 vols. (New York Univ. Press, 1985) 1, 119.

Hardy and Wordsworth

Transcription

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