360
PARTISAN REVIEW
modern one's
attention to itself, implying the centrality of natural
phenomena to the speaker's mind as well as his affinity with them. It also
creates an odd sense of security at the poem's opening, since a man fa–
miliar with the names of thickets, hedges, and plants can't, almost by
definition, be fierce or, in any case, dangerous. That is, the voice we are
hearing in the first line is that of nature's ally, and this nature, his diction
implies, is by and large human-friendly. Besides, he is leaning on that
coppice gate, and a leaning posture seldom bodes even mental aggres–
sion; if anything, it's rather receptive. Not to mention that the "coppice
gate" itself suggests a nature reasonably civilized, accustomed, almost on
its own accord, to human traffic.
The "spectre-gray" in the second line might perhaps put us on alert,
were it not for the run-of-the-mill alternation of tetrameters with trime–
ters, with their balladlike, folk-tunc echo, which plays down the ghostli–
ness of "spectre" to the point that we hear "spectrum" more than
"spectre," and our mind wanders to the realm of colors rather than
homeless souls. What we get out of this line is the sense of controlled
melancholy, all the more so since it establishes the poem's meter. "Gray,"
sitting here in the rhyming position, releases, as it were, the two
e's
of
"spectre" into a sort of exhaling sigh. What we hear is a wistful
eih,
which, together with the hyphen here, turns "shade" into a tint.
The next two lines, "And Winter's dregs made desolate / The weak–
ening eye of day," clinch, in the same breathe, the quatrain pattern
which is going to be sustained throughout this thirty-two-line poem and
tell you, I am afraid, something about this poet's general view of hu–
manity, or at least of its habitats. The distance between that weakening
eye of day, which is presumably the sun, and those winter dregs make the
latter hug, as it were, the ground and take on "Winter's" implied white
or, as the case may be, gray color. I have the distinct feeling that our
poet beholds here village dwellings, that we have here a view of a valley,
harking back to the old trope of the human spectacle distressing the
planets. The dregs, of course, are nothing but residue, what's left when
the good stuff has been drunk out of the cup. On top of that, the
"Winter's dregs" conjunction gives you a sense of a poet resolutely exit–
ing Georgian diction and standing with both feet in the twentieth cen–
tury.
Well, at least with one foot, as befits a poem written at the turn of
the century. One of the additional pleasures of reading Hardy is observ–
ing the constant two-step of the contemporary (which is to say, tradi–
tional) and his own (which is to say, modern) diction. Rubbing these
things against one another in a poem is how the future invades the pre-
