mixture of the evanescent and the enduring comes to a head in the last
stanzas, when the formal design of the poem shows through:
And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,
In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
Remains on the slope, as when that night
Saw us alight.I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love’s domain
Never again.
Each of the last stanza’s longer lines contains a word that in prose use
would be stressed but is passed over by the ‘unflinching rigour’ of the
metre, a phrase which encapsulates Hardy’s complaint that Time is
determined and mindless at the same time. But the ghostly possibility
of stressing ‘there’, ‘look’, ‘last’ and ‘old’ makes it possible to hear the
time of the last verse being stretched out too, as if the speaker were
deliberately clinging onto the fading vision at the same time as he is
dragged away from it, looking and looking as it (or he) shrinks and
shrinks. It is acleaving, in the sense of a simultaneous clinging and
parting of form and material, or an inseparable separation of husband
and wife. ‘Cleave’ is a word that Hardy would have heard in his mar-
riage service in its joining sense (‘a man shall leave his mother and
father and cleave unto his wife’) and during his marriage must have
wished for more of its dividing sense, but it is its possibility of mean-
ing both at once which describes the antagonistic indifference of his
poetic.
Unexpectedly, it was also this cleavage of form and content that proved
a revelation to one of Hardy’s most surprising admirers, Ezra Pound.
Pound’s respect for Hardy began early and never ceased: in 1914 he had
not quite casually suggested that Hardy’s clarity should earn him a place
in an Imagist anthology, and in the late Confucius to Cummingshe
nominated Hardy his poetic grandfather in the line descending from
Browning.^56 The most intimate contact he made, however, was in 1921 ,
when he wrote to Hardy privately and very respectfully for advice on
‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ after Eliot had givenQuia Pauper Amavia
frosty reception. Hardy’s reply is lost, but it seems to have come as a
bombshell:
180 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism