356
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
PARTISAN REVIEW
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
Now, although this thirty-two-line job is Thomas Hardy's most anthol–
ogized poem, it is not exactly the most typical of him, being extremely
fluent. And that's why perhaps it's so frequently anthologized; although,
save for one line in it, it could have been written by practically anyone
of talent and, well, insight. These properties are not so rare in English
poetry, at the turn of the century especially. It is a very fluent, very lucid
poem; its texture is smooth and its structure is conservative enough to
hark back to the ballad; its argument is clear and well sustained. In other
words, there is very little here of vintage Hardy; and now is as good a
time as any lying ahead to tell you what vintage Hardy is like.
Vintage Hardy is a poet who, according to his own admission,
"abhorred the smooth line." That would sound perverse were it not for
six centuries of verse writing predating his, and were it not for somebody
like Tennyson breathing down his neck. Come to think of it, his atti–
tude wasn't very dissimilar from that of Hopkins, and the ways they went
about it were, I daresay, not that different, either. At any rate, Thomas
Hardy is indeed by and large the poet of a very crammed, overstressed
line, filled with clashing consonants, yawning vowels; of an extremely
crabby syntax and awkward, cumbersome phrasing aggravated by his
seemingly indiscriminate vocabulary; of eye/ear/mind-boggling stanzaic
designs unprecedented in their never-repeating patterns.
So why push him on us, you may ask? Because
all
this was deliberate
and, in the light of what transpired in the English poetry of the rest of
this century, quite prophetic. To begin with, the intended awkwardness
of Hardy's lines wasn't just the natural striving of a new poet toward a
distinct diction, although it played that role, too. Nor should this
roughness of surface be seen only as a rebellion against the tonal loftiness
and polish of the post-Romantics. In fact, these properties of the post–
Romantics are quite admirable, and the whole thesis that Hardy, or any–
one else for that matter, "rebelled against" them should be taken with a
grain of salt, if taken at all. I think there is another, more down-to-earth
as well as more metaphysical explanation for Hardy's stylistic idiom,
