NATURE SHADOWING THOMAS HARDY 93years O!” and “Ah, no; the years, the years,” jolting us into silence with Time ’s
derision. But he doesn’t. An earthbound force besets this family.
As the stanzas set out singing “songs,” then clearing “moss,” breakfasting
“all,” and changing “house,” each of those words will need its rhyming mate.
Yet by the time we reach the refrain, “Ah, no,” there ’s still no rhyme and we ’ve
stopped listening for it. Only then does a final line, longer than the story lines or
the refrain, fasten “throngs” onto “songs,” “ript from the wall” onto “breakfast-
ing all.” Here as ever a poem’s shaping, its body language, reveals something
deeper than storytelling.
Hardy’s title, “During Wind and Rain,” makes each bottom line return with
news from nature. Do you wonder how long this family aglow in candlelight
will sing its songs? See “How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!” Whether a
neat gay garden will keep back the creeping moss? “See, the white storm-birds
wing across!” In gusting wind and rain, Coleridge found “Joy... wedding
nature to us.” Not Hardy. “Western wind when will thou blow, / The small
rain down can rain?”: this anonymous wind and rain slake the soil and bring
voyagers home. Hardy sees no such luck. Sick leaves, storm birds bring winter
violence, ripping our espaliered roses from the wall.
Meanwhile his music harshens. In the opening stanzas, three or four pleas-
ing accents per line give way abruptly to six: “How thesick leaves reel down in
throngs!.. .See, the white storm-birds wing across!” The next refrain quickens
with triple alliteration: “And the rottenroseisriptfrom the wall.” Finally the
poem’s last line, no further to go, starts with the adverb of catastrophe, “Down.”
Seven stresses drill through our human attempt to carve out permanence, even
in death. They end on “ploughs,” hinting at growth but grating rhymewise on
the high new “house,” eroding joy and memory itself—can a single raindrop
do so much? “Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.”