aesthetics, and particularly the Symbolist strand of it which leads towards
certain versions of modernism. His supporters ever after have had to
struggle to reconcile Hardy’s manner and matter; although they admired
his poetry above that of all other living poets, even de la Mare and
Thomas wondered how Hardy could get away with a form so detached
and manipulative. Few saw things as honestly as D. H. Lawrence, whose
study diagnosed Hardy’s problem as a tragic division between Love
and an implacable Law (expressed in his ruthless rhythms and rhymes),
and made it a policy pledge for his own work to reconcile them.^6 This
chapter will explore why Hardy might have had cogent reasons to allow
his work to remain unreconciled in itself and to organic and modernist
poetics, reasons which are both philosophical justifications of a particular
world-view and private symptoms deriving from the most painful parts
of his life.
Justifying Hardy’s anti-organicism is easier in principle than in prac-
tice, however, for the division between manner and matter in his poetry
often feels less like a trailblazing rejection of aesthetic unity and more like
flat self-contradiction. If his multitude of stanza-forms, coinages, neolo-
gisms, archaisms and syntax-bending hyphenations seem only to confirm
the labour and design of the writing, such conspicuous artistry is quite at
odds with Hardy’s constant theme of helplessness, where his characters are
victims of circumstance or the immortals, hopelessly in thrall to Time’s
passing, and always too late to mend a mistake. Such helplessness was
something Hardy was keen for his readers to experience for themselves,
moreover, since it is not entirely coincidental that so many of his poems
begin with a line which suggests a different rhythm to the one that
actually turns out to structure the poem. In ‘The Voice of the Thorn’,
for example:
When the thorn on the down
Quivers naked and cold,
And the mid-aged and old
Pace the path there to town,
In these words dry and drear
It seems to them sighing:
‘O winter is trying
To sojourners here!’
The innocent reader is tempted to scan the poem with a three-beat line,
because this would give an regular balance of stressed and unstressed
syllables, and allows the main verb to fall on the beat. Only reading on
does it become evident that the poem has two beats per line and that
Hardy’s indifference 149