british poetry in the age of modernism

chapter 5

Hardy’s indifference

Hardy was always meticulous about observing anniversaries, and in 1916 ,
on the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, did not fail to write him a
poem. It dwells on one of Hardy’s favourite themes, the callous indiffer-
ence of time and circumstance to the unique and precious, which in this
case means the heedlessness of the ‘borough clocks’ which ‘but samely
tongue the hour’ at Shakespeare’s passing, and likewise the snobbish
indifference of the Stratford burghers:

‘ – Ah, one of the tradesmen’s sons, I now recall...

Witty, I’ve heard...

We did not know him... Well, good-day. Death comes to all’.

(‘To Shakespeare’)^1

This complaint about the provincialism of seventeenth-century Stratford
nevertheless has a strong flavour of twentieth-century Dorchester to it.
Despite his recent freedom of the borough, Hardy had long felt that his
birth into the tradesman class still counted for more than his London
literary honour with many locals, as it had with his late wife, and the
poem’s irony is a self-protecting one, like the entry in his notebooks which
runs, ‘Base-born. Homer is said to be base-born: so is Virgil.^2 But the
implied parallel between his own unappreciated genius and Shakespeare’s
is misaligned in one important respect:

Through human orbits thy discourse to-day,

Despite thy formal pilgrimage, throbs on

In harmonies that cow Oblivion,

And, like the wind, with all-uncared effect

Maintain a sway

Not fore-desired, in tracks unchosen and unchecked.

Hardy celebrates the carefree casualness of Shakespeare’s writing in a
verse whose compressed hyphenations and alliterations show that nothing
in his own harmonies seems ‘all-uncared’, ‘not fore-desired’, unchosen or

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