whiteness of the sun has here become evidence of divine wrath; the reader
can only speculate about the fury of those calmly grayish leaves. The
metre of the last line makes the same point, for if one pronounces it
according to the three-beat metre of the previous stanzas, there is no stress
on ‘edged’ and the poem stops at a canter. But read according to the
natural stresses of the words themselves, the stress on ‘edged’ makes the
pond and its leaves neutral, separate, prosaically noted. The four stresses
give the poem some closure, its iambic regularity counteracting the
skipping anapaests of the previous verses that almost seem a parody of
Swinburne or Byronic passions, ‘on which lost the more by our love’, ‘like
an ominous bird a-wing’. But such closing neutrality is, exactly, achieved
at the price of the poem’s pattern, and thereby carefully loaded.
‘The Voice of Things’ likewise insists on the significance of indiffer-
ence. Forty years ago, the waves he heard were ‘in the sway of an all-
including joy’, because the listener was himself happy. Twenty years ago
he heard ‘a long ironic laughter / At the lot of men, and all the vapoury /
Things that be’, whose self-consciously manipulated rhyme reinforces his
point about the ironic insubstantiality of the speaker’s life. The poem
closes in the present day:
Wheeling change has set me again standing where
Once I heard the waves huzza at Lammas-tide;
But they supplicate now – like a congregation there
Who murmur the Confession – I outside,
Prayer denied.The stanza itself maintains that waves are occupied with their own
business and unaware of him, but the poem’s overall argument implies
that this, too, is a projection of his own emotional circumstances. The
refusal to develop the logic any further thus leaves the reader with two
different meanings – that the waves just are, without any voice, and that
their being so is an exclusion, that their meaning is in the speaker’s
irrelevance. Lammas-tide in theBook of Common Prayeris the time when
the story of the prophet Elijah hearing the still, small voice is read, an
event whose significance Hardy recalls in ‘Quid Hic Agis?’ by seeing
himself as the broken, disappointed prophet:
And spiritless,
In the wilderness
I shrink from sight
And desire the night,
(Though, as in old wise,Hardy’s indifference 171