472
PARTISAN REVIEW
It seems he's got no other instruments anyway: whenever faced with a choice
between a moving or a drastic utterance, he normally goes for the latter. This
may be attributed to certain aspects of Mr. Hardy's character or temperament; a
more appropriate attribution would be to the metier itself.
For poetry for Thomas Hardy was above all a tool of cognition. His corre–
spondence as well as his prefaces to various editions of his work are full of dis–
claimers of a poet's status; they often emphasize the diaristic, commentary role
his poetry had for him. I think this can be taken at face value. We should bear in
mind also that the man was an autodidact, and autodidacts are always more in–
terested in the essence of what they are learning than its actual data. When it
comes to poetry, this boils down to an emphasis on revelatory capacity, often at
the expense of harmony.
To be sure, Hardy went to extraordinary lengths to master harmony, and his
craftsmanship often borders on the exemplary. Still, it is just craftsmanship. He is
no genius at harmony; his lines seldom sing. The music available in his poems is
a mental music, and as such it is absolutely unique. The main distinction of
Thomas Hardy's verse is that its formal aspects - rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc. -
are precisely the aspects standing in attendance to the driving force of his
thought. In other words, they seldom generate that force; their main job is to
usher in an idea and not to obstruct its progress.
I suppose if asked what he values more in a poem - the insight or the tex–
ture - he would cringe, but ultimately he would give the autodidact's reply: the
insight. This is, then, the criterion by which one is to judge his work, and this
cycle in particular. It is the extension of human insight that he sought in this
study of the extremes of estrangement and attachment, rather than pure self-ex–
pression. In this sense, this premodernist was without peer. In this sense also, his
poems are indeed a true reflection of the metier itself, whose operational mode,
too, is the fusion of the rational and the intuitive. It could be said, however, that
he turned the tables somewhat: he was intuitive about his work's substance; as for
his verse's formal aspects, he was excessively rational.
For that he paid dearly. A good example of this could be his "In the
Moonlight," written a couple of years later but in a sense belonging to
Poems of
1912-13 -
if not necessarily thematically, then by virtue of its psychological
vector.
"0 lonely workman, standing there
In a dream, why do you stare and stare
At her grave, as no other grave there were?
"If your great gaunt eyes so importune
Her soul by the shine of this corpse-cold moon
Maybe you'll raise her phantom soon!"
