What have you now found to say of our past –
Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?It is angry, but in every way one tries to scan the second line, hopelessly
awkward as well, and if the metrical meaning of scanning is here equated
with a kind of judgement on the past, then the form’s inadequacy implies
there is no easy way to apportion due weight without either forcing or
being forced. The formal extraneousness, in other words, registers not
only the unresponsiveness of its object, but the uselessness of trying to
settle scores:
Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,
The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!
I am just the same as when
Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.‘I am just the same’ promises a return to the happy past at the same
time as it is an accusation – it wasyouwho changed – and with it, a
hopelessness, for if you have changed, then there is no going back.
Talking to someone who isn’t there to listen is a situation many
mourners have found themselves in; the difference with Hardy is only
that in his complaints against Time and the Will he had been doing it
for longer than most. But if the intense pain of irrelevance is a continuing
concern of Hardy’s melancholic form, the poems of 1912 – 13 are only
sharpened by the irony that here his melancholia actually finds a lost
object, so that its endlessness is present here and now. ‘At Castle Boterel’,
one of the last of these poems, movingly traces this disjunction in the way
it tries to say goodbye while simultaneously knowing that ‘goodbye is not
worthwhile’ (‘Without Ceremony’). It oscillates between seeing the past
as intensely significant and quite trivial, so that on revisiting a hillside spot
of their courtship, the speaker insists that ‘what we did as we climbed, and
what we talked of / Matters not much, nor to what it led’, only to assert
immediately that this lack of importance is ‘something that life will not be
balked of ’. Then, with a nod to a familiar Victorian anxiety:
Primeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;
But what they record in colour and cast
Is – that we two passed.The rocks record the transitory moment as a microsecond of geological
time, and equally make their passing something written in stone. This
Hardy’s indifference 179