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PARTISAN REVIEW
junction of "cleaving wing" - and "wing" itself especially, sitting here in the
rhyming position - pitches the line sufficiently high for Mr. Hardy to usher in a
notion central to his entire mental operation, that of "The Immanent Will that
stirs and urges everything."
Hexameter gives this notion's skeptical grandeur full play. The caesura sepa–
rates the formula from the qualifier in the most natural way, letting us fully ap–
preciate the almost thundering reverberations of consonants in "Immanent
Will," as well as the resolute assertiveness "that stirs and urges everything." The
latter is
all
the more impressive thanks to the reserve in the line's dactyls - which
borders, in fact, on hesitation - detectable in "everything." Third in the stanza,
this line is burdened with the inertia of resolution, and gives you a feeling the
entire poem has been written for the sake of this statement.
Why? Because if one could speak of Mr. Hardy's philosophical outlook (if
one can speak about a poet's philosophy at all, since, given the omniscient nature
of language alone, such discourse is doomed to be reductive by definition), one
would have to admit that the notion of Immanent Will was paramount to it.
Now, it all harks back to Schopenhauer, with whom the sooner you get ac–
quainted the better - not so much for Mr. Hardy's sake as for your own.
Schopenhauer will save you quite a trip; more exactly, his notion of the Will,
which he introduced in his
The World as Will and Idea,
will. Every philosophi–
cal system, you see, can easily be charged with being essentially a solipsistic, if
not downright anthropomorphic, endeavor. By and large they all are, precisely
because they are systems and thus imply a varying - usually quite high - degree of
rationality of overall design. Schopenhauer escapes this charge with his Will,
which is his term for the phenomenal world's inner essence; better yet, for a
ubiquitous nonrational force and its blind, striving power operating in the
world. Its operations are devoid of ultimate purpose or design and are not many
a philosopher's incarnations of rational or moral order. In the end, of course,
this notion can also be charged with being a human self-projection. Yet it can
defend itself better than others with its horrific, meaningless omniscience, per–
meating all forms of struggle for existence but voiced (from Schopenhauer's
point of view, presumably only echoed) by poetry alone. Small wonder that
Thomas Hardy, with his appetite for the infinite and the inanimate, zeroed in on
this notion; small wonder that he capitalizes it in this line, for whose sake one
may think the entire poem was written.
It
wasn't:
Prepared a sinister mate
For her - so gaily great -
A Shape of Ice. for the time far and dissociate.
For if you give four stars to that line, how are you to rank"A Shape
of
Ice,
