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PARTISAN REVIEW
claims from the threshold its artifice. A ballad - and, by extension, a
ballad-based meter - announces to the reader: Look, I am not entirely
for real; and poetry is too old an art not to use this opportunity for
displaying self-awareness. So the prevalence of this sort of tune, in other
words, simply coincides - "overlaps" is a better verb - in Hardy with the
agnostic's worldview, justifying along the wayan old turn of phrase
("haunted nigh") or a trite rhyme ("lyres" I"fires"), except that "lyres"
should alert us to the self-referential aspect of the poem.
And as that aspect goes, the next stanza is full of it. It is a fusion of
exposition and statement of theme. The end of a century is presented
here as the death of a man lying, as it were, in state. To appreciate this
treatment better, we have to bear in mind Thomas Hardy's other trade:
that of ecclesiastical architect. In that respect, he undertakes here some–
thing quite remarkable when he puts the corpse of time into the church
of the elements. What makes this undertaking congenial to him in the
first place is the fact that the century's sixty years are his own. In a sense,
he owns both the edifice and a large portion of its contents. This dual
affinity stems not only from the given landscape at the given season but
also from his practiced self-deprecation, all the more convincing in a
sixty-year-old.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Sccmed fervourless as
I.
That he had some twenty-eight years to go (in the course of which, at
the age of seventy-four, he remarried) is of no consequence, as he
couldn't be aware of such a prospect. An inquisitive eye may even zero
in on "shrunken" and perceive a euphemistic job in that "pulse of germ
and birth." That would be both reductive and irrelevant, however, since
the mental gesture of this quatrain is far grander and more resolute than
any personal lament. It ends with "I," and the gaping caesura after
"fervourless" gives this "as I" terrific singularity.
Now the exposition is over, and had the poem stopped here, we'd
still have a good piece, the kind of sketch from nature with which the
body of many a poet's work swells. For many poems, specifically those
that have nature as their subject, are essentially extended expositions
fallen short of their objective; sidetracked, as it were, by the pleasure of
the attained texture.
Nothing of the sort ever happens in Hardy. He seems always to
know what he is after, and pleasure for him is neither a principle nor a
