shakespeare and the great war not want to make significant claims for them, though most have their moments.
Theone poem which begins to generate poetic effects from the relationships it
establishes with Shakespeare is Thomas Hardy’s ‘To Shakespeare after 300 Years’.
Here are the opening two stanzas:
Bright baffling Soul, least capturable of themes,
Thou, who display’dst a life of commonplace
Leaving no intimate word or personal trace
Of high design outside the artistry
Of thy penned dreams,
Still shalt remain at heart unread eternally.
Through human orbits thy discourse to-day,
Despite thy formal pilgrimage, throbs on
In harmonies that cow Oblivion,
And, like the wind, with all-uncared effect
Maintain a sway
Not fore-desired, in tracks unchosen and unchecked.
(BHS,1)With the use of the capitalized ‘Soul’, Hardy invokes Ben Jonson’s prefatory poem to
the First Folio, ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr William Shakespeare:
And What He Hath Left Us’. There, Jonson had famously called Shakespeare the
‘Soule of the Age’. Indeed—and whether this was Hardy’s intention, or the result of
Gollancz’s shrewd editing, or chance—the physical placement of Hardy’s poem at
the volume’s proper opening reinforcesthis literary relationship. Hardy’s poem is
also rather Jonsonian in the problems it creates for the poems that follow it. Hardy’s
sense that Shakespeare’s ‘Bright baffling Soul’ is the ‘least capturable of themes’ sits
awkwardly with Binyon’s assertion that Shakespeare is a ‘soul-transfigured sign’
promising success; similarly, Hardy’s sense that Shakespeare’s immortality lies in
the Shakespearean harmonies that are to be found blowing like a wind within
mankind’s discourse ‘in tracks unchosen and unchecked’ renders tenuous, or draws
attention to the vague nature of, Binyon’s claim to place and know what the
Shakespearean music stands for. It also offers the proper and poetic repudiation of
Fussell’s desire to use Shakespeare as a kind of litmus test to ascertain whether or not
the poet has properly understood the nature of the Great War; the Shakespearean
presence can be neither checked, nor ‘fore-desired’.
At least, it cannot in any simple way be ‘fore-desired’. For, as Hardy well
knows, the Shakespearean wind can be conjured and invoked, and that is what
Hardy himself does here, as he delicately places his poem in the context of
the Great War. The poem invokes the war as the ‘Oblivion’ that threatens, if
ineffectively, Shakespeare’s works. At the same time, the Great War as ‘Oblivion’
is to be understood in particularly Shakespearean terms, as it is a particularly
Shakespearean word. Shakespeare uses ‘oblivion’ most significantly inTroilus and
Cressida, a play concerned with exploring the question of ‘what’s aught but as