Perhaps ‘The Walk’, one of Hardy’s most beautiful and painful poems,
puts this state of mind most clearly:
You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree
By the gated ways
As in earlier days;
You were weak and lame,
So you never came,
And I went alone, and I did not mind
Not thinking of you as left behind.
After the strict neutrality of the opening lines, ‘You were weak and
lame’ might be pitying, or it might have an undercurrent of suppressed
anger at her weak and lame excuses, a suggestion bolstered by the stress
possibilities of ‘So you never came’. If on ‘you’, it simply emphasises that
you didn’t come and I did; but if on ‘never’, it makes her action irritat-
ingly perpetual in the manner typical of long-term domestic irritation
(‘youneverdo the washing-up’), especially as he has previously said that
she did come in the past. With this in mind, saying that ‘I did not mind’
might be protesting a bit much, for as the poem progresses, not minding
or caring come to mean something quite the opposite. If he did not think
of her as left behind, the implication of the second stanza is that nothing
has changed:
I walked up there to-day
Just in the former way:
Surveyed around
The familiar ground
By myself again:
What difference, then?
Only that underlying sense
Of the look of a room on returning thence.
The understated sensitivity of this last line must have inspired one of
Larkin’s best openings, ‘Home is so Sad’:
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back.
Rooms look the same on returning to them, which is how we know
that we have changed. By insisting that nothing externally has altered
between then and now, the poem makes its point backhandedly, for
noticing the unexpected continuity is testimony that something has
176 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism