Then up he sprang, and with his knife –
And with his knife
He let out jeering Johnny’s life,
Yes; there, at set of sun.
The slant ray through the window nigh
Gilded John’s blood and glazing eye,
Ere scarcely Mother Lee and I
Knew that the deed was done.
The punctuation marks ‘Yes’ as a fourth stress, a moment of under-
standing which stands out as metrically unassimilable to the poem’s
action, as the two lines that follow also slow the pace to a crawl with five
stresses in four beats, its hypnotised reflections making the murder scene
into a stained-glass window. The metrical disjunction between knowing
and willing mocks the speaker in ‘The Night of the Dance’, whose
assertion that ‘She will return in Love’s low tongue / My vows as we
wheel around’ is counteracted by the out-of-time ‘Yes’ that precedes this,
as if reflecting on it could not but tread on the magical moment’s toes.
‘Yes’ or ‘Aye’ is similarly out of step in ‘The Dawn after the Dance’, ‘The
Conformers’, ‘Former Beauties’, ‘The Christening’, ‘A Dream or No’
and, most famously, ‘After a Journey’ – precisely because its subject is
knowledge out of time with event. Other moments of ghastly realisation
often have an extra stress as if time were proverbially standing still for a
second – for example, when the peasant of ‘The Curate’s Kindness’
realises he will have to stay with his wife after forty years of unhappi-
ness (‘Then I sank – knew ’twas quite a foredone thing’), or the mother
realises she has poisoned her daughter unnecessarily in the penultimate
verse of ‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’. Thirty stanzas of 4. 3. 4. 3 ballad
metre hammer home the fatedness of events, but at the moment of truth:
The ́re she la ́y–sı ́lent, bre ́athless, de ́ad,
Sto ́ne-de`ad she la ́y – wro ́nged, sı ́nless, she ́!–
Ghost-white the cheeks once rosy-red:
Death had took her. Death took not me.
For Hardy, we always know too late, and when Schopenhauer himself
makes the parallel between poetic form and predestination, his difference
with Hardy is clear:
A happily rhymed verse, through its indescribably emphatic effect, excites the
feeling as if the idea expressed in it already lay predestined, or even preformed, in
the language, and the poet had only to discover it... the easy and unforced
nature of his rhymes... have occurred automatically as if by divine decree; his
ideas come to him already in rhyme.(II: 428 – 9 )
162 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism