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PARTISAN REVIEW
motion and stasis. The carriage carrying the heroine past the place where she
shortly will be buried seems to arrest the poet's imagination as a metaphor either
of mobility's myopic vision of immobility or of space's disregard for either. In
any case, the mental input in these stanzas is somewhat larger than the sentimental
one, though the latter comes first .
More accurately, the poem strays from the emotional into the rational, and
rather quickly so. In this sense, it is indeed vintage Hardy, for the trend is seldom
the reverse with him. Besides, every poem is a means of transportation by defini–
tion, and this one is only more so, since metrically at least it is about a means of
transportation. With its iambic tetrameter and the shifting caesura that makes its
fifth line slide into an anapest, its stanza wonderfully conveys the tilting move–
ment of a horse-driven carriage, and the closing couplets mimic its arrival. As is
inevitable with Hardy, this pattern is sustained throughout the poem.
We first see the features of the cycle's heroine lit - most likely dimly - by
"the borough lights ahead." The lighting here is more cinematic than poetic;
nor does the word "borough" heighten the diction much - something you
would expect when it comes to the heroine's appearance. Instead, a line and a
half are expended on stressing - literally, and with a touch of tautological relish
- her lack of awareness of the impending transfornlation into being "the face of
the dead." In effect, her features are absent; and the only explanation for our
poet's not grabbing this opportunity to depict them is the prospect of the cycle
already existing in his head (although no poet is ever sure of his ability to pro–
duce the next poem) . What's present of her, however, in this stanza is her speech,
echoed in "And you told of the charm of that haloed view." One hears in this
line her "It's charming," and conceivably, "Such a halo!" as she was by all ac–
counts a churchgoing woman.
The second stanza sticks to the "moorway" topography no less than to the
chronology of events. Apparently the heroine's outing occurred one week - per–
haps slightly less - before she died, and she was interred on the eighth day at this
place, apparently to her left as she drove home by the moorway. Such literalness
may owe here to the poet's deliberately reining in his emotion, and "spot" sug–
gests a conscious deflation. It is certainly in keeping with the notion of a car–
riage trundling along, supported, as it were, by leafsprings of tetrameters. Yet
knowing Hardy's appetite for detail, for the mundane, one may as well assume
that no special effort was applied here and no special significance was sought.
He simply registers the pedestrian manner in which an absurdly drastic change has
taken place.
Hence the next line, which is the highest point in this stanza. In "And be
spoken of as one who was not," one detects the sense not so much of loss or
unbearable absence as that of all-consuming negation. "One who was not" is
too resolute for comfort or, for that matter, for discomfort, and negation of an
individual is what death is all about. Therefore, "Beholding it with a heedless
