‘quivers’, like ‘pace’ two lines later, is a verb that has a stress but no
underlying beat. A chastened re-reading gives the verse a rushed, uncer-
tain feel appropriate to the subject of being only temporary sojourners
here, but the poem has also deliberately set its reader off on the wrong
foot. ‘The Conformers’, too, opens with its apparent four-beat affirma-
tive, ‘Yes; we’ll wed, my little fay’, but like the marriage, the beginning is
the exception to the rule, for the first line of all the other stanzas (‘the
formal faced cohue’... ‘we shall not go in stealth’... ‘when down to dusk
we glide’) conform very strictly to three beats. ‘In Childbed’ starts:
In the middle of the night
Mother’s spirit came and spoke to me,
Looking weariful and white –
As ’twere untimely news she broke to me.
No sensitive reader would give the first line four stresses: the weight on
so slight a word as ‘In’ might be acceptable, but surely not on ‘of’, as a
tetrameter line would require. Only when it becomes clear that this is
another false start, that the rest of the poem is a completely regular
alternation of tetrameter and pentameter, does the double sense of ‘un-
timely’ become clearer. Unwelcome and ghostly, the missing stress in the
first line inaudibly marks the untimeliness of a spirit’s prophecy that a
new child ‘but shapes for tears / New thoroughfares in sad humanity’. The
same trick occurs in ‘Her Dilemma’:
The two were silent in a sunless church,
Whose mildewed walls, uneven paving-stones,
And wasted carvings passed antique research;
And nothing broke the clock’s dull monotones.
Once we learn that the poem is pentameter, it gives a further ominous-
ness to the silent, sunless beginning: in retrospect, something turns out
not to have been said, as indeed it proves not to be. But the reader only
learns the meaning of all these metrical exceptions after the poem has
been misconstrued first. As so many of Hardy’s poems want to point out,
we may have good reasons for thinking as we do, but we will be wrong-
footed, for ‘experienceunteaches – (what at first one thinks to be the rule
in events)’.^7 Should we ever learn where we went wrong, where we missed
the point, the condition of that knowledge is that it must come too late.
But the trouble with such artful illustrations of helplessness is that they
are evidently carefully planned, so that the invention and effort required
to make them work belies the meaning. The same contradiction is visible
in Hardy’s novel vocabulary: for example, the currentOEDcites Hardy as
150 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism