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PARTISAN REVIEW
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
"He was a man who used to notice such things"?
If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
"To him this must have been a familiar sight."
If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come
to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone."
If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
"He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"?
And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again , as they were a new bell's boom,
"He hears it not now, but used to notice such things"?
These twenty hexametric lines are the glory of English poetry, and they owe
all that they've got precisely to hexameter. The good question is to what does
hexameter itself owe its appearance here, and the answer is so that the old man
can breathe more easily. Hexameter is here not for its epic or by the same classi–
cal token elegiac connotations but for its trimeter-long, inhale-exhale proper–
ties. On the subconscious level, this comfort translates into the availability of
time, into a generous margin. Hexameter, if you will, is a moment stretched, and
with every next word Thomas Hardy in "Mterwards" stretches it even further.
The conceit in this poem is fairly simple: while considering his immanent
passing, the poet produces cameo representations of each one of the four seasons
as his departure's probable backdrop. Remarkably well served by its title and free
of the emotional investment usually accompanying a poet when such prospects
are entertained, the poem proceeds at a pace of melancholy meditation - which
is what Mr. Hardy, one imagines, wanted it to be.
It
appears, however, that
somewhere along the way the poem escaped his control and things began to oc–
cur in it not according to the initial plan.
In
other words, art has overtaken craft.
But first things first, and the first season here is spring, which is ushered in
