Victorian Poetry

DANIEL BROWN

reduces it to a mechanistic determinism: a conception that is reinforced by
the poem's jolting idiom and hammering rhythm.
Small wonder, then, that in other poems - such as "To Outer Nature"
(1898) - Hardy remains deeply nostalgic for a pre-Darwinian and huma-
nized nature: "Show thee as I thought thee / When I early sought thee" (TH
1-2). The identical rhymes suggest that in his earlier experiences of nature
there was little to distinguish his knowledge from his will, that his under-
standing of nature was solipsistic. Such Romantic "thought" has been
revealed by the progressive force of "Time" to be an idealist encumbrance
upon reality, an embellishment that obfuscates the facts of nature: "such
readorning," Hardy writes, "Time forbids with scorning" (16-17). The
frustrated Will to Truth featured in "To Outer Nature" emerges in the 1866
poem "Hap" as theological. There he argues that even the hypothesis of a
cruelly "vengeful god" (TH 1) would ensure that the universe was informed
with some purpose. In "Hap," the lack of cosmic intent disclosed by
modern (principally Darwinian) science means that "joy lies slain" (9). An
atomistic "Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain" (11), disallowing him
from finding in them an intrinsic principle of meaning. Hardy's poem
nominates "Hap" as the name for nature's First Principle, a three-letter
word to supersede "God."

Ill

In Memoriam, "Dover Beach," and the poems by Hardy all charge science
with draining the natural world of spiritual and metaphysical meaning.
George Meredith provides an interesting contrast to such defensive stances
in his mischievous sonnet "Lucifer in Starlight" (1883), which contemplates
a purely naturalistic universe not with anxiety but amusement. Lucifer rises
from Hell "On a starred night" (GM 1) to survey the earth:

Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars

With memory of the old revolt from Awe,

He reached a middle height, and at the stars,

Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.

Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,

The army of unalterable law. (9-14)

"The army of unalterable law" - the elaborately lawful universe that
modern science discloses - proceeds in supreme indifference to Lucifer. In
stark contrast to his old sparring partner God, this "army" offers no
prospect of even acknowledging his existence let alone of entering into a
contest with him. The Dark Ages cosmology of Lucifer's "dark dominion"

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