90 PA RT O N E
plume” that greets “the growing gloom.” While Coleridge ’s “Frost at Mid-
night” has a “redbreast sit and sing / Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare
branch / Of mossy apple-tree,” Hardy’s mind of winter gave him listless breezes
and leaden skies.
Behind this outlook a private ache matched his surroundings. In Cornwall
in 1870, on the cliff-hung, sea-struck western coast near legendary Camelot,
he fell in love with Emma Gifford. Eventually their marriage went askew, as
she became withdrawn then deranged. Yet her death in 1912 provoked his finest
poems, landscapes of remorse and loss impassioning memory.
Their forthright speech, rhythm, and rhyme save Hardy’s lyrics from mor-
bidness. “The Going,” written just weeks after Emma died, wanders
Where so often at dusk you used to be;
Till in darkening dankness
The yawning blankness
Of the perspective sickens me!Rhymes ending on an unstressed syllable already tweak the ear: “dankness /
blankness.” Leaving the last two syllables unstressed, “usedto be /.. .sickens
me,” can sound grotesque or comical. In this lament, where comical won’t
do but awkward will, Hardy takes that risk. We feel blank dusk spawning his
haplessness.
However steeped in landscape and weather, these nostalgia-driven poems
always foreground the human scene. “I Found Her Out There” tells how Emma
could not be buried on the Cornish shore where they passionately met, but
inland instead, in Dorset. Hardy’s stanzas start with the much-missed woman,
veer toward coastal scenes, then return to her.
... I brought her here,
And have laid her to rest
In a noiseless nest
No sea beats near.
She will never be stirred
In her loamy cell
By the waves long heard
And loved so well.
So she does not sleep
By those haunted heights
The Atlantic smites
And the blind gales sweep,
Whence she often would gaze
At Dundagel’s famed head,
While the dipping blaze
Dyed her face fire-red.