JOSEPH BRODSKY
471
Hence, "Dear ghost." Thus designated, she can almost be touched. Or else
"ghost" is the ultimate in detachment. And for somebody who ran the whole
gamut of attitudes available to one human being vis-a-vis another, from pure
love to total indifference - "ghost" offers one more possibility, if you will, a
postscript, a sum total. "Dear ghost" is uttered here indeed with an air of dis–
covery and of summary, which is what, in fact, the poem offers two lines later:
"Yet abides the fact, indeed, the same,
-/Y
ou are past love, praise, indifference,
blame." This describes not only the condition of a ghost but also a new attitude
attained by the poet - an attitude that permeates the cycle of
Poems
1912-13
and
without which that cycle wouldn't be possible.
This finale's enumeration of attitudes is tactically similar to "The Conver–
gence of the Twain" 's "grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent." Yet while it is
propelled by similar self-deprecating logic, it adds up not to the reductive
("choose one") precision of analysis but to an extraordinary emotional summary
that redefines the genre of funeral elegy no less than that of love poetry itself.
Immediate as the former, "Your Last Drive" amounts, on account of its finale,
to a much-delayed postscript, rarely encountered in poetry, to what love amounts
to. Such a summary is obviously the minimal requirement for engaging a ghost
in a dialogue, and the last line has an engaging, indeed somewhat flirtatious air.
Our old man is wooing the inanimate.
VII
Every poet learns from his own breakthroughs, and Hardy, with his professed
tendency to "exact a full look at the worst," seems to profit in, and from,
Poems
of
1912-13
enormously. For all its riches of detail and topographical reference,
the cycle has an oddly universal, almost impersonal quality, since it deals with the
extremes of the emotional spectrum. "A full look at the worst" is well matched
by a full look at the best, with very short shrift given
to
the mean. It is as though
a book were being rifled through from the end to the beginnning before being
shelved.
It never got shelved. A rationalist more than an emotionalist, Hardy, of
course, saw the cycle as an opportunity to rectifY what many and in part he him–
self regarded as a lyrical deficiency in his poetry. And true enough,
Poems of
1912-13
does constitute a considerable departure from his pattern of graveyard
musing, grand on metaphysics and yet usually rather bland sentimentally. That's
what accounts for the cycle's enterprising stanzaic architecture, but above all for
its zeroing in on the initial stage of his marital union: on meeting a maiden.
In theory, that encounter ensures an upsurge of positive sentiment, and at
times it does. But it was so long ago that the optic of intro- and retrospection
often proves insufficient. As such it gets unwittingly replaced by the lens habit–
ually employed by our poet for pondering his beloved infinites. Immanent
Wills, and all, exacting a full look at the worst.
