JOSEPH BRODSKY
"Why, fool , it is what I would rather see
Than all the living folk there be;
But alas, there is no such joy for me!"
"Ah - she was one you loved, no doubt,
Through good and evil, through rain and drought,
And when she passed, all your sun went out?"
"Nay: she was the woman I did not love,
Whom all the others were ranked above,
Whom during her life I thought nothing of."
473
Like an extremely high percentage of Hardy's verse, the poem seems to hark
back to the folk ballad, with its use of dialogue and its element of social com–
mentary. The mock romantic opening and the nagging lapidary tone of triplets
- not to mention the poem's very title - suggest a polemical aspect to "In the
Moonlight" when viewed within the contemporary poetic discourse. The poem
is obviously a "variation on a theme" frequent enough in Hardy's own work in
the first place.
The overtones of social commentary, usually fairly sharp in a ballad, are
somewhat muted here, though not entirely. Rather, they are subordinated to the
psychological thrust of the poem. It is extremely shrewd of the poet to make
precisely a "workman," and not the urbane, sneering passerby the carrier of the
loaded, terrifying insight revealed in the last stanza. For normally a crisis-ridden
conscience in literature is the property of the educated classes. Here, however, it
is an uncouth, almost plebeian "workman" who weighs in with at once the
most menacing and the most tragic admission Hardy's verse ever made.
Yet although the syntax here is fairly clear, the meter sustained, and the psy–
chology powerful, the poem's texture undermines its mental achievement with its
triple rhyme, warranted neither by the story line nor, what's worse, its own qual–
ity. In short, the job is expert but not particularly rewarding. We get the poem's
vector, not its target. But as far as the truth about the human heart is concerned,
this vector may be enough. That's what the poet, one imagines, has told himself
on this and on many other occasions. For the full look at the worst blinds you
to your own appearance.
VIII
Blissfully, Hardy lived long enough not to be trapped by either his achievements
or his failures. Therefore, we may concentrate on his achievements, perhaps with
an additional sense of their humanity or, if you will, independent of it. Here's
one of them, a poem called "Afterwards." It was written somewhere around
1917, when quite a lot of people all over the place were busy doing each other
in and when our poet was seventy-seven years old.
