workmanlike his exoskeletally ‘crustacean’ style is, the more it would
display the loss of very world it describes. Hardy’s hyphenations, nonce-
words, and burstings of metrical boundaries are a kind of melancholy
compensation for the absence of the object, marking its loss by their
display of attention to it. The extraordinary gravity with which he treats
his material in ‘In Front of the Landscape’, for example, only empha-
sises its evanescence. The poem bursts with alliteration (‘dolorous and
dear’, ‘waste waters’, ‘coppice-crowned’, ‘ghost-like gauze’, ‘meadow or
mound’ in the first two stanzas alone), hyphenated phrases (‘re-creations’,
‘halo-bedecked’, ‘sea-swell’) and Latinate circumlocution, in which
walking is ‘paced advancement’ or ‘perambulates’ and the dead are ‘with
the earth’s crust / Now corporate’. Yet the effort that has gone into the
language ‘labouring on’ seems at odds with the passive content, where
Hardy is always the recipient: ‘there would breast me sights’, ‘later images
too did the day unfurl me’, ‘so did beset me scenes’. What the poem
reveals is that these visions are of events and people he missed at the time,
which come back ‘as they were ghosts avenging their slights by my bypast
/ Body-borne eyes’:
For, their lost revisiting manifestations
In their live time
Much had I slighted, caring not for their purport,
Seeing behind
Things more coveted, reckoned the better worth calling
Sweet, sad, sublime.The extra stress in that last line emphasises Hardy’s deliberate covet-
ings, but also that they were placed on the wrong objects and at the wrong
time, and he is paying for it now. There is a kind of desperation in the
labour and attention of the language, a striving to memorialise which only
reveals how the object is already missing. In a passage that might be
commentary on a number of Hardy’s poems, Benjamin writes of the style
of Baroquegravitas:
The relationship between mourning and ostentation, which is so brilliantly
displayed in the language of the baroque, has one of its sources here; so too does
the self-absorption, to which these great constellations of the worldly chronicle
seem but a game, which may, it is true, be worthy of attention for the meaning
which can reliably be deciphered from it, but whose never-ending repetition
secures the bleak rule of a melancholic distaste for life.( 140 )
And Benjamin suggests a name for this elaborately self-conscious wrap-
ping up of objects in unsuitable forms: allegory. With Coleridge and
168 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism