‘You may miss me then’, she says, alternating between possibility and a
rather bossy permission:
But I shall not know
How may times you visit me there
Or what your thoughts are, or if you go
There never at all. And I shall not care.In an ironic re-working of Christina G. Rossetti’s measured unhap-
piness in ‘When I am dead, my dearest’ (‘I shall not see the shadows / I
shall not feel the rain’), Emma’s indifference is both bald factual truth
and a haughty argument, the ambiguity of which Hardy’s reply picks up
exactly:
True: never you’ll know. And you will not mind.
But shall I then slight you because of such?
Dear ghost, in the past did you ever find
The thought, ‘What profit,’ move me much?
Yet abides the fact, indeed the same, –
You are past love, praise, indifference, blame.
The extra stress on ‘True’, like his ‘Yes’ elsewhere, marks a slowed-
down moment, as if stepping out of the argument to mull over the
emotions that emerge in the ambiguous possibilities of stress in the line.
If it reads ‘andyouwill not mind’, the implication is, ‘but I will’, making
him sound hurt and aggressive. If it is read ‘and youwillnot mind’ the
stress on that vital word for Hardy indicates volition as well as futurity,
that her indifference is a calculated one, that her desire and her fate have
conspired to mean the same thing. But the overt meaning of ‘what profit’,
a promise that he will visit regardless, contains a sting: if he doesn’t mind
performing the profitless task, then he will not mind profitlessly arguing
with her either. If something like this thought spurs the resignation of the
last lines, then just as he seems to acknowledge that his indifference has
been motivated, the extra stresses of the last line say the opposite. The line
has four beats, but to say it with only four stresses makes the three
introductory unstressed syllables sound liltingly off-handed:
You are past lo ́ve, pra ́ise, indı ́fference, bla ́me.
A more prosaic stress-pattern of the words would demand a weight on
‘Past’, which by slowing the line down gives it a twist: in an address that
may or may not be to her, Emma is indeed a past love. The line’s metrical
ambiguity allows indifference and vindictiveness to be as undecidable and
simultaneous as they have been throughout the poem.
Hardy’s indifference 175