happened. The very indifference of gate, hill or tree is noticeable because
it should not be so, and the same charge is tacitly being made against his
own ‘not thinking’ and not minding.
The poems of 1912 – 13 feelingly trace such indifference again and again;
Nature’s lack of respect in ‘A Death-Day Recalled’ and ‘Rain on a Grave’,
the world’s in ‘Places’ and ‘A Circular’, and his own necessary ignorance
in ‘The Haunter’ and ‘His Visitor’. Its dual aspect appears especially
when her indifference in death is seen as all of a piece with her married
life, as in ‘Without Circumstance’ or ‘I Found Her Out There’, where her
passing was that life’s chief event:
I found her out there
On a slope few see
That falls westwardly
To the salt-edged air
[.. .]
I brought her here
And have laid her to rest
In a noiseless nest
No sea beats near.
The life they shared for forty years is skipped over: she was anobjet
trouve ́, as inactive when picked up as laid down. Yet by linking ‘out
there’ with passion, romance and anger (the smiting Atlantic, flailing
hair and sobbing, throbbing sea), the poem also quietly admits the
emotional burial of her life ‘here’ in Dorset. With its rocking, lullaby
rhythm, the poem seems to be singing her to sleep like a baby (her grave is
a ‘nest’, she has the ‘heart of a child’), a gesture which simultaneously
offers an explanation for her childish lack of understanding while alive
and a consolation that her death is a return to what she always was, as in
‘Rain on a Grave’:
Soon will be growing
Green blades from her mound
And daisies be showing
Like stars on the ground
Till she form part of them
Ay – the sweet heart of them
Loved beyond measure
With a child’s pleasure
All her life’s round.
The pun on ‘sweet heart’ adds to the hurt behind ‘a child’s pleasure’ –
she loved the daisies with the measurelessness more appropriate to the
Hardy’s indifference 177