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PARTISAN REVIEW
apotheosis of absence, yet Mr. Hardy seeks to aggravate it further with "Will this
thought rise on those who will meet my face no more." "Rise" imparts to the
presumably cold features of the "stilled at last" the temperature of the moon.
Behind all this there is, of course, an old trope about the souls of the dead
residing on stars. Still, the optical literalness of this rendition is blinding. Appar–
ently when you see a winter sky you see Thomas Hardy. That's the kind of mys–
tery he had an eye for, in his lifetime.
He had an eye for something closer to the ground, too. As you read
"Afterwards," you begin to notice the higher and higher position in the lines of
each stanza of those who are to comment on him. From the bottom in the first,
they climb to the top in the fifth. This could be a coincidence with anyone
other than Hardy. We also have to watch their progression from "the neigh–
bours" to "a gazer" to "one" to "they" to "any." None of these designations is
particular, let alone endearing. Well, who are these people?
Before we get to that, let's learn something about "any" and what he ex–
pects from them.
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 sllch things"?
There is no particular season here, which means it's any time. It's any back–
drop also, presumably a countryside, with a church in the fields, and its bell
tolling. The observation described in the second and third lines is lovely but too
common for our poet to claim any distinction for making it. It's his ability to
describe it that "any" might refer to by saying in his absence, "He hears it not
now, but used to notice such things." Also, "such things" is a sound: interrupted
by wind yet returning anew. An interrupted but resuming sound could be re–
garded here, at the end of this auto-elegy, as a self-referential metaphor, and not
because the sound in question is that of a bell tolling for Thomas Hardy.
It is so because an interrupted yet resuming sound is, in fact, a metaphor for
poetry: for a succession of poems emerging from under the same pen, for a suc–
cession of stanzas within one poem. It is a metaphor for "Afterwards" itself,
with all its peregrination of stresses and suddenly halting caesuras. In this sense,
the bell of quittance never stops - not Mr. Hardy's, anyway. And it doesn't stop
as long as his "neighbors," "gazers," "one," "they," and "any" are us.
IX
Extraordinary claims for a dead poet are best made on the basis of his entire
oeuvre; as we are perusing only some of Thomas Hardy's work, we may dodge
the temptation. Suffice it to say that he is one of the very few poets who, under
minimal scrutiny, easily escape the past. What helps his escape is obviously the
