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

NATURE SHADOWING THOMAS HARDY 91

Short lines drive home a stark seascape, as ocean “smites” the “heights” and
three stresses make “blind gales sweep.”
Why then “blind”? Indifferent to us, oblivious to her? A marine force in each
stanza seems to moor the sundered couple: salt-edged air, beating sea, sweeping
gales, flailing wind, throbbing swell. Hardy knew well the ocean of Matthew
Arnold ’s “Dover Beach,” “the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw
back, and fling, / At their return, up the high strand”—a wave-worn world
holding no “certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”
His sorrowing imagination contradicts Emma’s own words for their first
Cornwall meetings “at this very remote spot, with beautiful sea-coast, and the
wild Atlantic ocean rolling in with its magnificent waves and spray, its white
gulls and black choughs and grey puffins, its cliffs and rocks and gorgeous sun
settings sparkling redness in a track widening from the horizon to the shore.”
She has a keen eye for the wintry scene, but “beautiful,” “magnificent,” “gor-
geous” don’t match “those haunted heights” where “blind gales sweep.” His
stark tone makes the lost moment true, makes it matter.
Estranged from his wife before she died, Hardy had met Florence, whom he
would later marry. Of course she was hurt to hear his reaction to Emma’s death:
“Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me.” “Let me view you,
then,” he cries in “The Voice,” “yes, as I knew you then, / Even to the original
air-blue gown!” Published the year Florence married him, this poem ends

faltering forward,

Leaves around me falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

And the woman calling.

Those falling rhythms, “faltering.. .fall ing.. .norward.. .calling,” and cold
wind “oozing thin” through a thorn tree, sink us in the poet ’s turf, where land-
scape presses on memory.
In body and spirit both, Hardy revisited his prime love ’s landscape. “After a
Journey” opens on a perfect line that Hamlet could have uttered, “Hereto I come to
view a voiceless ghost.” Then come Hardy’s bizarrest cadences and couplings:

Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?

Up the cliff, down, till I’m lonely, lost,

And the unseen waters’ ejaculations awe me.

Emma’s ghost has drawn him to Pentargan Bay, where creaturely life ignores
them: “The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily.” Then his rhyme buckles
present to past, assuring her that “though Life lours”—darkens, threatens—
he ’ll always come back to where “Our days were a joy, and our paths through
flowers.”