I might still arise,
Go forth, and stand
And prophesy in the land),
I feel the shake
Of wind and earthquake
And consuming fire
Nigher and nigher,
And the voice catch clear,
‘What doest thou here?’
The question’s ambiguity resonates for ‘The Voice of Things’; the
voice of God was asking Elijah what he thought he was doing in a cave,
in order to interrupt his faithless despair and command him to get
back to work. Hardy’s prophetic task, on the other hand, was to pro-
claim the impossibility of just that conscious, moral God, and his trans-
lation of the divine command makes it sound like a death-sentence, ‘a
small voice anon / Bade him up and be gone’. On this reading, ‘what
doest thou here?’ is both the voice of God and an ironic assertion of his
pointlessness.
This awareness of the intensity of indifference is more than a theo-
logical matter, though, since it becomes the emotional crux of Hardy’s
most famous poems, the 1912 – 13 series that followed the death of his
wife. No commentator has ever doubted that Emma’s passing and his
own reaction to it came as a shock to Hardy, but in one sense his poems
about her death sharpen the same problem that had always underlain his
form and his philosophy. Just as he and Emma froze one another out
when alive, so in death her utter unresponsiveness to him cannot but be
felt as another insult in their struggles, and so poems that are ostensibly
about grief at the loss of the beloved actually become a continuation of
domestic arguments. There is anger behind the opening question of ‘The
Going’, as well as regret:
Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow’s dawn
And calmly, as if indifferent quite
You would close your term here, up and be gone
The plaintiveness makes Emma sound like a student or lodger who had
irresponsibly slipped away, her headstrong flightiness the only concession
to her actions not being entirely, hurtfully deliberate. What follows is an
extraordinarily honest mixture of the self-pity and aggression often buried
in grief:
172 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism