Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

NATURE SHADOWING THOMAS HARDY 89

human and rural circumstance are still loved as books and films: Far from the
Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Wood-
landers, Tess of the Durbervilles, Jude the Obscure. But when his last novel was
dubbed Jude the Obscene, Hardy turned to verse, publishing eight hundred old
and new poems up to his death. The Victorian novelist became a modern poet,
revered by Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Derek
Walcott, and countless others.
Hardy’s novels feel no more upbeat than his verse, though sometimes they
end in weddings. One of them tells us, “happiness was but the occasional episode
in a general drama of pain.” In these books, weather and landscape touch every
page, nature not simply echoing but looming over human destiny.
“Novels of Character and Environment,” Hardy called them, joining two
sides of life. Even before we meet Diggory Venn, who peddles red pigment
to sheep farmers, The Return of the Native opens on Egdon Heath, a “heathy,
furzy, briary wilderness... the untameable, Ishmaelitish thing.” Ishmael we
know—son of Abraham and Hagar, cast out in the wilderness (and the survivor
in Melville ’s Moby-Dick). Through Hardy, American readers come to know
furze, or gorse, a spiny yellow-flowered shrub cut for fodder, bedding, winter
fuel, as we ’re drawn back into a pre-Christian landscape of pagan ritual.
Egdon, a huge Wessex heath that may once have housed King Lear, has a
Druidic and Saxon past and goes deeper than human time. Hardy paints it as
“somber,” “embrowned,” “waste,” “gloom,” “obscurity,” “unenclosed wild,”
“exhaling darkness.” Key events take place there, shaped and then absorbed by
the implacable terrain.
Nature shadows if not actually determining the human condition in Hardy’s
poems too. “We stood by a pond that winter day,” he ’ll say,

And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,

And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;

—They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Instead of ver perpetuum, Eden’s and Arcadia’s perpetual green, winter is seldom
far from Wessex, and any God there is, scolds humanity and nature both.
“The Darkling Thrush,” written on the last day of the nineteenth century,
starts this way:

I leant upon a coppice gate,

When Frost was spectre-gray,

And Winter’s dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

Even when a bird ’s “full-hearted evensong” bursts through “bleak twigs
overhead,” it ’s an “aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, / In blast-beruffled