Wordsworth had more poems than Hardy; in Philip Larkin’s Oxford Book of
Twentieth-Century Verse(1973), Hardy had more than any other poet.
Apart from a few ballads, the poems are apparently personal, prompted by place,
time and mood. He used the strong rhythms of the hymns he and his father had
accompanied in the village church, and chose the rough vernacular style of Walter
Scott’s ballad romances. The title Moments of Vision(1917) suggests Hardy’s tradi-
tion from Wordsworth, Shelley and Browning. He owed much to his friend the Rev.
William Barnes (1801–1886), a gifted writer of verse in standard English and in
Dorset dialect. Barnes’s example (in poems such as ‘Woak Hill’ and ‘Linden Lea’)
showed how local speech could ground a lyric in everyday life. To Hardy no word or
thing was in itself unpoetic or poetic: his poems range from the tiny to the great. The
interest of Hardy lies not in his attempted ‘philosophy’, but in his religious regard for
the universe and its inhabitants, a country supernaturalism. His landscapes are full
of omens and presences, and he wished to be remembered for his habit of noticing
them, as he says in ‘Afterwards’:... If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
‘He was one who had an eye for such mysteries’?
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 such things’?There is a surpr ising amount of rising here, but Hardy is a surprising writer. The
stro ng metrical tune of his verse carries his ‘unadjusted’ diction well.
As Pound said, Hardy’s Poems of 1912–13‘lift him to his apex, sixteen poems from
“The Going” to “Castle Boterel”, all good, and enough for a lifetime’. They are plan-
ge nt elegies for his wife, who had died suddenly, and for the love they had at first
enjoyed. Alongside the poems Pound mentions, ‘The Voice’, ‘Beeny Cliff ’ and ‘After
a Journey’ stand out.I see what you are doing: you are leading me on
To the spots we knew when we haunted here together,
The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone
At the then fair hour in the then fair weather,
And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow
That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,
When you were all aglow,
And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!
(‘After a Journey’)War poetry and war poets
In 1915 Hardy published ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations” ’:Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.338 12 · ENDS AND BEGINNINGS: 1901–19