Strange: a friend casually mentioned Thomas Hardy last night, and I wound up returning to Hardy's poetry for the first time in a while, and my brain's now taken a bit aback. I should clarify this: I have thought semi-recently about some Hardy, mainly the more-typically anthologized pieces, and I've thought about him vaguely on occasion. But tonight I took to revisiting the poems from Satires of Circumstance, particularly the devastating ones that together are rather stoically called Poems of 1912-1913. Stoically, I say, because those are the poems Hardy wrote about the death of his wife Emma, poems he described collectively as "an expiation" and which Ezra Pound described, also collectively, as "the greatest elegy in the English language." (The Pound may be slightly off: in trying to find the exact quote, I keep coming up empty.) While reading, I was struck especially by "After A Journey," a poem about which I doubt I have nothing profound to say, but which is worth reproducing here for its own sake; I think it's haunting. After A JourneyThe strange thing is that in reading this I was-- or seemed to be-- in several places and several times all at once, too many things in my own memory going off like flash-bulbs that I kept wincing my eyes as if doing so would make a difference. For the first time, I think I had a true sense of the poem's sensibilities: its toughness, but its desperation; its melancholia and its hatred of it; its reach of longing and its frustrated awareness that such longing is futile. And, oh yes, regret, much regret, restrained but not stifled. It is, in a way, Hardy's "She should have died hereafter," but for a heart far less disciplined than Macbeth's-- and for a mind more haunted by apparitions. And in this piece especially, the tension between the language of emotion and the language of artifice is palpable, though I'd suggest neither emerges dominant over the other. Instead they're forced, almost like divorced parents, to coexist for some other reasons larger than either of them. There are dimensions of artifice, to be sure; but there are ways in which the poem is as transparent in its expression as a love note from William Carlos Williams. But it's not pure venting, or purely personal expression, either. The rhymes and rhythms are so deftly managed, and the poem's tropes harken back to long-standing conventions of elegaic love poetry.
I come to interview a Voiceless ghost;
Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?
Up the cliff, down, till I'm lonely, lost,
And the unseen waters' soliloquies awe me.
Where you will next be there's no knowing,
Facing round about me everywhere,
With your nut-coloured hair,
And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.
Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;
Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;
What have you now found to say of our past --
Viewed across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?
Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?
Things were not lastly as firstly well
With us twain, you tell?
But all's closed now, despite Time's derision.
I see what you are doing: you are leading me on
To the spots we knew when we haunted here together,
The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone
At the then fair hour in the then fair weather,
And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow
That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,
When you were all aglow,
And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!
Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,
The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,
Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,
For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.
Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,
The bringing of me here; nay, bring me here again!
I am just the same as when
Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.
Pentargan Bay
In sum, the poem's a small wonder of aesthetic and emotional balance, but it's a balance that often seems precariously kept, which, in turn, intensifies the experience of it, the centrifugal matter of a poet being able to maintain his composure without lapsing into solipsism or solecism on one side, or clinicism or euphuism on the other. And there you almost have it, a perfect statement of elegy, perfect Hardy: a Romantic spirit governed by Victorian decorum, but conducted with many of the sensibilities of a Modern. And Hardy-- like Housman, and to a lesser degree Matthew Arnold-- never entirely belonged to the age (or ages) that contained him. No wonder he, again like Housman, seemed so disaffected with his times, with the notions of them or the capacities for hope in them. But Hardy could make despair beautiful, in part, I suspect, because his despair was never as utter as he may have sometimes feared, that there was still some dark shard of hope swaddled in all that fluorescent obscurity. (Okay, so I had more to say about that poem than I thought. This tends to happen to the Not-So-Good Doc.)
I mentioned, though, that I was taken aback, and it wasn't simply for the beauty of the poem. If you want to know why, you can click here to read why.
I remembered as soon as I saw it again, some notes and doodles in the margins of my edition, how that poem was once one of the informing spirits behind a poem of mine. (For all you boring critics out there, read in "source-texts" for "informing spirits." 
) That poem, too, was about meeting up "for an interview with a Voiceless ghost," a mysterious figure that would prove the foil for a subsequent series of meditations. That poem-- which I'd tentatively called "The Place"-- just kept defeating me. After well over 250 drafts in two years, it stymied me to the point I had to let it go, and now I'm quite sure I don't possess even a single draft of it, so many of the originals done on the interiors of cigarette packs, loose scraps of paper and in notebooks lost and junked over the years. All gone, though surely to no one's loss. I wasn't Thomas Hardy.
But I thought further, too, about other poems on my mind at the time, and they're all gone, too, no editions or versions of any of them in my possession anymore, fallen or blown away like scurf. It hardly matters, I guess. I wasn't Thomas Hardy, after all; I wasn't even Alfred Noyes, and I'd surely look at the lot now with the same embarrassment with which I look at my semi-annual doodles. But sometimes one wonders. And as I wondered, secondarily so as I reread through the Hardy, I came upon those last lines of that poem and realized something I had never known, how much Hardy's poem had in fact been lurking behind the arras of another poem, it too lost to time and circumstance. Let's just simply say that realization stunned me, and I had to set Hardy down for a while. Something about that second poem's spirit now seemed so very different, as if it had been contaminated for reasons not worth explaining here, and I was then struck by the irony that said poem had very much been about the violence between what one wants to see (and, in fact, thought did see) and what is (and, in fact, inevitably will be). That, however, was never supposed to be the ethical center of the poem, but I now suspect Hardy's poem had imprinted itself into my thinking far more than I'd ever been aware. Some bile in my mouth, some anger at my own obliviousness, I remembered once more how Time, like Love, finally satirizes us all. And Time, also like Love, prefers incision to jest, invective to raillery. That's simply The Way It Is. One simply smirks and moves on about one's business. Except in this case, I guess, because I at least have a rejoinder to Time's sick joke, however smug and ill-tempered: Hardy Har Har.
Harrumph.
) That poem, too, was about meeting up "for an interview with a Voiceless ghost," a mysterious figure that would prove the foil for a subsequent series of meditations. That poem-- which I'd tentatively called "The Place"-- just kept defeating me. After well over 250 drafts in two years, it stymied me to the point I had to let it go, and now I'm quite sure I don't possess even a single draft of it, so many of the originals done on the interiors of cigarette packs, loose scraps of paper and in notebooks lost and junked over the years. All gone, though surely to no one's loss. I wasn't Thomas Hardy.But I thought further, too, about other poems on my mind at the time, and they're all gone, too, no editions or versions of any of them in my possession anymore, fallen or blown away like scurf. It hardly matters, I guess. I wasn't Thomas Hardy, after all; I wasn't even Alfred Noyes, and I'd surely look at the lot now with the same embarrassment with which I look at my semi-annual doodles. But sometimes one wonders. And as I wondered, secondarily so as I reread through the Hardy, I came upon those last lines of that poem and realized something I had never known, how much Hardy's poem had in fact been lurking behind the arras of another poem, it too lost to time and circumstance. Let's just simply say that realization stunned me, and I had to set Hardy down for a while. Something about that second poem's spirit now seemed so very different, as if it had been contaminated for reasons not worth explaining here, and I was then struck by the irony that said poem had very much been about the violence between what one wants to see (and, in fact, thought did see) and what is (and, in fact, inevitably will be). That, however, was never supposed to be the ethical center of the poem, but I now suspect Hardy's poem had imprinted itself into my thinking far more than I'd ever been aware. Some bile in my mouth, some anger at my own obliviousness, I remembered once more how Time, like Love, finally satirizes us all. And Time, also like Love, prefers incision to jest, invective to raillery. That's simply The Way It Is. One simply smirks and moves on about one's business. Except in this case, I guess, because I at least have a rejoinder to Time's sick joke, however smug and ill-tempered: Hardy Har Har.
Harrumph.
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