JOSEPH BRODSKY
361
sent and, for that matter, the past to which the language has grown ac–
customed. In Hardy, this friction of stylistic tenses is palpable to the
point of making you feel that he makes no meal of any, particularly his
own, modern, stylistic mode. A really novel, breakthrough line can easily
be followed by a succession of jobs so antiquated you may forget their
antecedent altogether. Take, for instance , the second quatrain of the first
stanza in "The Darkling Thrush":
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The relatively advanced imagery of the first line (similar, in fact, to the
opening passage in Frost's "Woodpile") quickly deteriorates here into a
Jin-de-siecle
simile that even at the time of this poem's composition
would have given off a stale air of pastiche. Why doesn 't our poet strive
here for fresher diction , why is he settling for obviously Victorian - even
Wordsworthian - tropes , whv doesn't he try to get ahead of his time -
something he is clearly capable of?
First, because poetry is not a rat race yet. Second, because at the
moment, the poem is at the stage of exposition. The exposition of a
poem is the most peculiar part, since at this point poets by and large
don't know which way the poem will go. Hence, expositions tend to
be long, with English poets especially, and in the nineteenth century in
particular. On the whole, on that side of the Atlantic, they have a
greater set of references, while over here we've got to look mainly after
ourselves. Add to this the pure pleasure of verse writing, of working all
sorts of echoes into your texture, and you'll realize that the notion of
somebody being "ahead of his time, " for all its complimentary ring, is
essentially the benefit of hindsight.
In
the second quatrain of the first
stanza, Hardy is squarely behind his time, and he doesn't mind this in the
least.
In
fact, he loves it. The chief echo here is of the ballad, a term de–
rived from
ballare,
to dance . This is one of the cornerstones of Hardy's
poetics. Somebody should calculate the percentage of ballad-based meters
in this poet's output; it may easily pass fifty . The explanation for this is
not so much young Thomas Hardy's habit of playing the fiddle at coun–
try fairs as the English ballad's proclivity for gore and comeuppance, its
inherent air of
danse macabre.
The chief attraction of ballad tunes is pre–
cisely their dancing - playful, if you insist - denomination, which pro-
