410
"I go hence soon to my resting-place;
"You may miss me then. But I shall not know
How many times you visit me there,
Or what your thoughts are, or if you go
There never at all. And I shall not care.
Should you censure me I shall take no heed,
And even your praises no more shall need."
PARTISAN REVIEW
And here is our heroine, verbatim. Because of the deftly blended tenses, this is a
voice from beyond the grave as much as from the past. And it is relentless. With
every next sentence, she takes away what she has given a sentence before. And
what she gives and takes is obviously his humanity. This way she reveals herself to
be indeed a good match for her poet. There is a strong echo of marital argu–
ment in these lines, the intensity of which overcomes completely the listlessness
of the verse. It gets much louder here and drowns the sound of the carriage
wheels on the cobblestones. To say the least, dead, Emma Hardy is capable of
invading her poet's future to the point of making him defend himself.
What we have in this stanza is essentially an apparition. And although the
cycle's epigraph - "Traces of an old flame" - is taken from Virgil, this particular
passage bears a very close resemblance, both in pitch and substance - to the fa–
mous elegy by Sextus Propertius, from his "Cynthia Monobiblos." The last two
lines in this stanza, in any case, sound like a good translation of Cynthia's final
plea: "And as for your poems in my honor, burn them, burn them!"
The only escape from such negation is into the future, and that's the route
our poet takes: "True: never you'll know." That future, however, should be fairly
distant, since its foreseeable part, the poet's present, is already occupied. Hence,
"And you will not mind" and "But shall I then slight you because of such?"
Still, with that escape comes - in this last stanza's first line especially - a piercing
recognition of the ultimate parting, of the growing distance. Characteristically,
Hardy handles this line with terrific reserve, allowing only a sigh to escape in the
caesura and a slight elevation of pitch in "mind." Yet the suppressed lyricism
bursts into the open and claims its own in "Dear ghost."
He indeed addresses an apparition, but one that's free of any ecclesiastical
dimension. This is not a particularly mellifluous form of address, which alone
convinces one of its literalness. He is not searching here for a tactful alternative.
(What could there be instead? The meter, allotting him here only two syllables,
rules out "Dear Emma"; what then, "Dear friend"?) A ghost she is, and not be–
cause she is dead, but because though less than a physical reality she is far more
than just a memory: she is an entity he can address, a presence - or absence - he is
familiar with. It's not the inertia of marriage but of time itself - thirty-eight
years of it - that solidifies into a substance that may be, he feels, only hardened
by his future, which is but another increment of time.
