476
PARTISAN REVIEW
Still, technically speaking, this line and a half do show off what Mr. Win–
ters appreciates so much about our poet. And our poet himself is cognizant of
trotting out natural detail here, and polishing it up a bit on top of that. And
this is what enables him to wrap it up with the colloquial" 'He was a man who
used to notice such things.' " This understatement, nicely counterbalancing the
opening line's ramshackle grandeur, is what he was perhaps after in the first place.
It's highly quotable, so he attributes it to the neighbors, clearing the line of the
charge of self-consciousness, let alone of being an auto-epitaph.
There is no way for me to prove this - though there is also no way to refute
it - but I think the first and last lines, "When the Present has latched its postern
behind my tremulous stay" and " 'He was a man who used to notice such
things,' " existed long before "Afterwards" was conceived, independently. Natu–
ral detail got in between them by chance, because it provided a rhyme (not a very
spectacular one, so it needed a qualifier). Once there, it gave the poet a stanza,
and with that came the pattern for the rest of the poem. These particular things,
then, don't actually seem to be waht he's noticing; its the
idea
of noticing in a
particular way.
One indication of this is the uncertainty of the season in the next stanza. I'd
suggest it's autumn, since the stanzas after deal respectively with summer and
winter; and the leafless thorn seems fallow and chilled. This succession is slightly
odd in Hardy, who is a superb plotter and who, you might think, would be one
to handle the seasons in the traditional, orderly manner. That said, however, the
second stanza is a work of unique beauty.
It all starts with yet another confluence of sibilants in "eyelid's soundless
blink." Again, proving and refuting may be a problem, but I tend to think that
"an eyelid's soundless blink" is a reference to Petrarch's "One life is shorter than
an eyelid's blink"; "Afterwards," as we know, is a poem about one's demise.
But even if we abandon the first line with its splendid caesura followed by
those two rustling
5'S
between "eyelid's" and "soundless," ending with two more
5'S,
we've got plenty here. First, we have this very cinematographic, slow-motion
passage of "The dewfall-hawk" that "comes crossing the shades to alight ... "
And we have to pay attention to his choice of the word "shades," considering
our subject. And if we do, we may further wonder about this "dewfall-hawk,"
about its "dewfall" bit especially. What, we may ask, does this "dewfall," fol–
lowing an eyelid's blink and preceding "shade," try to do here, and is it, perhaps,
a well-buried tear? And don't we hear in "to alight/Upon the wind-warped up–
land thorn" a reined-in or overpowered emotion?
Perhaps we don't. Perhaps all we hear is a pile up of stresses, at best evoking
through their "up/warp/up" sound the clapping of wind-pestered shrubs. Against
such a backdrop, an impersonal, unreacting "gazer" would be an apt way to de–
scribe the onlooker, stripped of any human characteristics, reduced to eyesight.
"Gazer" is fitting, since he observes our speaker's absence and thus can't be de-
