Where I could not follow
With wing of swallow
To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!
‘Anon’ may be shorthand for ‘henceforth’, or it may mean ‘shortly’,
which hints at self-mourning (I cannot see you again soon, but I will in a
while). But the word also suggests its old meaning of ‘unity in one body,
mind state’, as if in glimpsing her they might be together again, and
simultaneously flickers with the mournful-angry meaning of ‘anonym-
ous’, which makes the last three words utter the baffled reality of her
disappearance: you, ever, anon. ‘In spite of his often deterministic
views’, comments Ramazani, ‘Hardy represents his wife not as the passive
victim of circumstance but as an active agent’, which is true, except that
it is his deterministic views that also make him unable to believe in the
indifference of circumstances.^54 For instance, in the next stanza, it is
ambiguous whether it is the morning that is ‘unmoved, unknowing’, or
he himself, which suggests the same double emphasis on indifference
again: the morning could not have known, but its indifference is fre-
quently a cause of grief for Hardy elsewhere in the poems (‘Rain on a
Grave’, ‘A Death-Day Recalled’, ‘Beeny Cliff ’). He, by contrast, might
have known, and yet by not doing so resembles the indifference of the
morning light, hardening where his wife’s longed-for cry is the ‘softest’.
The irony is that this mutual ignorance is the one thing that he and
she actually shared at that great moment, both being ‘unmoved, un-
knowing’, and as always in Hardy’s ghost-ridden world, the dead seem
simply a continuation of the living. And so the dispute continues: in
stanza three, ‘why do you make me leave the house’ implies thatsheis
guilty for making him believe that he sees her, and if the syntax is
followed through the stanza, guilty for not actually being there. But even
as he realises her absence, the ‘yawning blankness / Of the perspective’
describes her sickening disappearance as if it were someone bored and
tired with his constant seeking. Death and non-being have become just
another move in the argument, as ‘days long dead’ are in the fifth stanza:
Why, then, latterly, did we not speak,
Did we not think of those days long dead,
And ere your vanishing strive to seek
That time’s renewal? We might have said,
‘In this bright spring weather
We’ll visit together
Those places that once we visited.’Hardy’s indifference 173