emptiness of the world controlled by Fate. The form’s indifference to its
content, what Thomas called his ‘sonnets... so unlike sonnets in spirit’
demonstrates the true vanity of things exactly as it manipulates them
most consciously.^53 And behind this notion of form which is both indif-
ferent and meaningful lies the paradox that has animated Hardy’s com-
plaints against the Immanent Will from the beginning: his inability to
accept indifference as simply indifferent. The Will is something that is
both unconscious of human misery and yet always guilty for exactly that
lack of awareness. Everything is predestined, and yet at the same time
everything is random because the Will is unconscious. At the core of a
poem that sets out to prove the opposite to everything I have said so far,
‘He Never Expected Much’, the world speaks:
‘I do not promise overmuch,
Child; overmuch;
Just neutral-tinted haps and such,’
You said to minds like mine.
Wise warning for your credit’s sake!
Which I for one failed not to take,
And hence could stem such strain and ache
As each year might assign.That Hardy claims he was not disappointed only underscores the fact
that he believes the world owed him anything in the first place. ‘Neutral-
tinted haps’ makes the point, for if neutral is a ‘tint’ it is anything but
neutral for the painter, for whom its neither-nor character is full of
promise. In Hardy’s world, thereareno ‘Neutral Tones’, which is that
famous poem’s point; the neutral-tinted colours of winter are exactly the
analogue of the emotional situation described, an indifference which is
frozen hatred. He is just a ‘tedious riddle’, something she can’t be
bothered to solve; their parting argument is also merely word-play, her
smile hovering indifferently between dead and alive. The pointed antag-
onism of neutrality is revealed in the last verse:
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.The anaphoric ‘and... and... and’ is explicitly neutral about the
relation between sun, tree and pond, as if they were being recalled with no
sense of connection between them. But the powerful emotions behind
this sense of detachment are hinted at by the way the neutral-toned
170 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism