JOSEPH BRODSKY
475
with an awkward, almost creaking septuagenarian elegance: no sooner does May
get in than it is hit by a stress. This is all the more noticeable after the indeed
highly arch and creaking "When the Present has latched its postern behind my
tremulous stay," with its wonderfully hissing confluence of sibilants toward the
end of the line. "Tremulous stay" is a splendid conjunction, evocative, one
would imagine, of the poet's very voice at this stage, and thus setting the tone
for the rest of the poem.
Of course, we have to bear in mind that we are viewing the whole thing
through the prism of the modern, late-twentieth-century idiom in poetry. What
seems arch and antiquated through this lens wouldn't necessarily have produced
the same effect at the time. When it comes to generating circumlocutions, death
has no equals, and at the Last Judgment it could cite them in its defense. And as
such circumlocutions go, "When the Present has latched its postern behind my
tremulous stay" is wonderful if only because it shows a poet more concerned
with his diction than with the prospect he describes. There is a peace in this line,
not least because the stressed words here are two and three syllables long; the
unstressed syllables play the rest of these words down with the air of a postscript
or an afterthought.
Actually, the stretching of the hexameter - i.e., time - and filling it up be–
gins with "tremulous stay." But things really get busy once the stress hits "May"
in the second line, which consists solely of monosyllables. Euphonically, the net
result in the second line is an impression that Mr. Hardy's spring is more rich in
leaf than any August. Psychologically, however, one has the sense of piling-up
qualifiers spilling well into the third line, with its hyphenated, Homer-like epi–
thets. The overall sensation (embodied in the future perfect tense) is that of time
slowed down, stalled by its every second, for that's what monosyllabic words are:
uttered - or printed - seconds.
"The best eye for natural detail," enthused Yvor Winters about Thomas
Hardy. And we, of course, can admire this eye sharp enough to liken the reverse
side of a leaf to newly spun silk - but only at the expense of praising the ear. As
you read these lines out loud, you stumble through the second, and you've got
to mumble fast through the first half of the third. And it occurs to you that the
poet has stuffed these lines with so much natural detail not for its own sake but
for reasons of metric vacancy.
The truth, of course, is that it's both: that's your real natural detail: the ratio
of, say, a leaf to the amount of space in a line. It may fit, and then it may not.
This is the way a poet learns the value of that leaf as well as of those available
stresses. And it is to alleviate the syllabic density of the preceding line that Mr.
Hardy produces the almost trochaic "Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk" qualifier,
not out of attachment to this leaf and this particular sensation. Had he been at–
tached to them, he'd have moved them to the rhyming position, or in any case
out of the tonal limbo where you find them.
