Six Poets Read online

And re-enact at the vestry-glass

  Each pulpit gesture in deft dumb-show

  That had moved the congregation so.

  That’s very much a novelist’s poem, an incident, no moral drawn, just his vanity, her disillusion, the way things are, the poet simply putting a frame round it. Hardy’s poems seldom offer consolation even when that consolation might just amount to some hint of meaning or sense in the universe. Religion certainly had none for Hardy; when he was eighty-nine, he scribbled down a bitter verse called ‘Christmas: 1924’.

  Christmas: 1924

  ‘Peace upon earth!’ was said. We sing it,

  And pay a million priests to bring it.

  After two thousand years of mass

  We’ve got as far as poison-gas.

  Hardy had given up writing novels in 1896 after the hostile reception of Jude the Obscure, a copy of which, it’s particularly worth noting today, was burned publicly by a bishop. He had written poetry all his life and now devoted himself exclusively to it. I suspect that it was what Virginia Woolf called the ‘architecting’ of novels that no longer appealed to him. Poetry has it over the novel in that it uses fewer words. You can do more with less.

  He did, though, write one huge poem – The Dynasts, about the Napoleonic wars. Some of it is windy and sprawling, but Hardy was nothing if not down to earth (it’s part of his fascination with graves). Here is a section about the night before Waterloo, but not about the common soldiers as Shakespeare might have done it, but the common creatures, disturbed by the preparations for the coming battle.

  The Eve of Waterloo

  (from The Dynasts)

  CHORUS OF PHANTOMS

  The eyelids of eve fall together at last,

  And the forms so foreign to field and tree

  Lie down as though native, and slumber fast!

  Sore are the thrills of misgiving we see

  In the artless champaign at this harlequinade,

  Distracting a vigil where calm should be!

  The green seems opprest, and the Plain afraid

  Of a Something to come, whereof these are the proofs –

  Neither earthquake, nor storm, nor eclipse’s shade!

  Yea, the coneys are scared by the thud of hoofs,

  And their white scuts flash at their vanishing heels,

  And swallows abandon the hamlet-roofs.

  The mole’s tunnelled chambers are crushed by wheels,

  The lark’s eggs are scattered, their owners fled;

  And the hedgehog’s household the sapper unseals.

  The snail draws in at the terrible tread,

  But in vain; he is crushed by the felloe-rim;

  The worm asks what can be overheard,

  And wriggles deep from a scene so grim,

  And guesses him safe; for he does not know

  What a foul red flood will be soaking him!

  Beaten about by the heel and toe

  Are butterflies, sick of the day’s long rheum,

  To die of a worse than the weather-foe.

  Trodden and bruised to a miry tomb

  Are ears that have greened but will never be gold,

  And flowers in the bud that will never bloom.

  So the season’s intent, ere its fruit unfold,

  Is frustrate, and mangled, and made succumb,

  Like a youth of promise struck stark and cold! …

  Some of that sympathy with the unredeemed lives of small creatures found its way into many of Hardy’s poems. Once, when he was a boy in Dorset, he was crossing the field where the sheep were penned and took it into his head to get down on his hands and knees and pretend to crop the grass to see what it was like to be a sheep. When he looked up, the whole flock was gathered round him, gazing at him with astonished faces.

  The railway hadn’t reached Dorset when Hardy was born in 1840, but when it did, it was, of course, the Great Western, with its terminus at Paddington. It has been said that in London you settle near the station you arrive at, and when Hardy came to London to work as an architect, he lived in Bayswater and was married at St Peter’s, Paddington. Several of his poems are set on the railway, including this:

  At the Railway Station, Upway

  ‘There is not much that I can do,

  For I’ve no money that’s quite my own!’

  Spoke up the pitying child –

  A little boy with a violin

  At the station before the train came in, –

  ‘But I can play my fiddle to you,

  And a nice one ’tis, and good in tone!’

  The man in the handcuffs smiled;

  The constable looked, and he smiled, too,

  As the fiddle began to twang;

  And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang

  With grimful glee:

  ‘This life so free

  Is the thing for me!’

  And the constable smiled, and said no word,

  As if unconscious of what he heard;

  And so they went on till the train came in –

  The convict, and boy with the violin.

  Another of Hardy’s poems set on a train is a poetic version of a scene that occurs with much the same details in his last novel, Jude the Obscure.

  Midnight on the Great Western

  In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy,

  And the roof-lamp’s oily flame

  Played down on his listless form and face,

  Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going,

  Or whence he came.

  In the band of his hat the journeying boy

  Had a ticket stuck; and a string

  Around his neck bore the key of his box,

  That twinkled gleams of the lamp’s sad beams

  Like a living thing.

  What past can be yours, O journeying boy

  Towards a world unknown,

  Who calmly, as if incurious quite

  On all at stake, can undertake

  This plunge alone?

  Knows your soul a sphere, O journeying boy,

  Our rude realms far above,

  Whence with spacious vision you mark and mete

  This region of sin that you find you in,

  But are not of?

  Hardy was the son of a jobbing builder, but many of his relations were farm labourers and some had been born in the workhouse. At Hardy’s funeral service in Westminster Abbey, an old tramp had somehow got himself into the reserved seats. A clergyman neighbour of the Hardys got into conversation with him, thinking he’d just come in from the cold, but he found to his surprise that the tramp knew a great deal about Hardy and indeed was probably one of his relatives.

  Quite early in his life, Hardy began to cut himself off socially from his lowly background, while artistically he drew on it more and more. He even tried to bump up his social origins, making a great deal of even the vaguest of well-to-do connections (exactly the opposite of what a writer would do today). When he was an old man and a celebrity, he was visited by the Prince of Wales (later the Duke of Windsor), to whom he gave lunch. The gardener, who was as much a social climber as Hardy, but on a lower slope, appropriated the chicken bone that the Prince had gnawed, as a souvenir.

  Hardy’s poems are sometimes like entries in a writer’s (or a film-maker’s) notebook. Complete in itself, this poem is also a note for a scene that could become a longer story.

  The Whitewashed Wall

  Why does she turn in that shy soft way

  Whenever she stirs the fire,

  And kiss to the chimney-corner wall,

  As if entranced to admire

  Its whitewashed bareness more than the sight

  Of a rose in richest green?

  I have known her long, but this raptured rite

  I never before have seen.

  – Well, once when her son cast his shadow there,

  A friend took a pencil and drew him

  Upon that flame-lit wall. And the lines

  Had a lifelike semblance
to him.

  And there long stayed his familiar look;

  But one day, ere she knew,

  The whitener came to cleanse the nook,

  And covered the face from view.

  ‘Yes,’ he said: ‘My brush goes on with a rush,

  And the draught is buried under;

  When you have to whiten old cots and brighten,

  What else can you do, I wonder?’

  But she knows he’s there. And when she yearns

  For him, deep in the labouring night,

  She sees him as close at hand, and turns

  To him under his sheet of white.

  Hardy’s verse is often a bit ungainly; it doesn’t always run smooth. One of the reasons for this is that he melds ordinary conversation with the verse, and even, as in this next poem, bits of advertising copy. It’s this casual style that has made him a greater influence on later poets than, say, Eliot or Yeats, who have had more acclaim. Auden, Betjeman and Larkin – all owe a good deal to Hardy.

  At the Draper’s

  ‘I stood at the back of the shop, my dear,

  But you did not perceive me.

  Well, when they deliver what you were shown

  I shall know nothing of it, believe me!’

  And he coughed and coughed as she paled and said,

  ‘O, I didn’t see you come in there –

  Why couldn’t you speak?’ – ‘Well, I didn’t. I left

  That you should not notice I’d been there.

  ‘You were viewing some lovely things. “Soon required

  For a widow, of latest fashion”;

  And I knew ’twould upset you to meet the man

  Who had to be cold and ashen

  ‘And screwed in a box before they could dress you

  “In the last new note in mourning”,

  As they defined it. So, not to distress you,

  I left you to your adorning.’

  Now a happier poem, though like so many of Hardy’s, it ends with a grave. It’s a poem to his cat. Samuel Butler said that the true test of the imagination is the ability to name a cat, but T. S. Eliot said that cats have several names, including the name they’re given and the name that they eventually acquire. The name that Hardy’s cat eventually acquired was Kiddleywinkempoops Trot.

  Last Words to a Dumb Friend

  Pet was never mourned as you,

  Purrer of the spotless hue,

  Plumy tail, and wistful gaze

  While you humoured our queer ways,

  Or outshrilled your morning call

  Up the stairs and through the hall –

  Foot suspended in its fall –

  While, expectant, you would stand

  Arched, to meet the stroking hand;

  Till your way you chose to wend

  Yonder, to your tragic end.

  Never another pet for me!

  Let your place all vacant be;

  Better blankness day by day

  Than companion torn away.

  Better bid his memory fade,

  Better blot each mark he made,

  Selfishly escape distress

  By contrived forgetfulness,

  Than preserve his prints to make

  Every morn and eve an ache.

  From the chair whereon he sat

  Sweep his fur, nor wince thereat;

  Rake his little pathways out

  Mid the bushes roundabout;

  Smooth away his talons’ mark

  From the claw-worn pine-tree bark,

  Where he climbed as dusk embrowned,

  Waiting us who loitered round.

  Strange it is this speechless thing,

  Subject to our mastering,

  Subject for his life and food

  To our gift, and time, and mood;

  Timid pensioner of us Powers,

  His existence ruled by ours,

  Should – by crossing at a breath

  Into safe and shielded death,

  By the merely taking hence

  Of his insignificance –

  Loom as largened to the sense,

  Shape as part, above man’s will,

  Of the Imperturbable.

  As a prisoner, flight debarred,

  Exercising in a yard,

  Still retain I, troubled, shaken,

  Mean estate, by him forsaken;

  And this home, which scarcely took

  Impress from his little look,

  By his faring to the Dim

  Grows all eloquent of him.

  Housemate, I can think you still

  Bounding to the window-sill,

  Over which I vaguely see

  Your small mound beneath the tree,

  Showing in the autumn shade

  That you moulder where you played.

  2 October 1904

  Hardy never said much about writing or the difficulties of it, or the moral difficulties of it. Kafka said that a writer was doing the devil’s work, writing a wholly inadequate response to the brutishness of the world, and Hardy increasingly felt this. It’s not that it’s an immoral activity or an amoral one; it’s just that the act of creation is something to which the ordinary standards of human behaviour do not apply.

  Hardy never liked to be touched. He always walked in the road to avoid brushing against people, and servants were told never to help him on with his coat and just to drop the shawl around his shoulders and not tuck him in. The pen had been his weapon in his struggle for life – and it had been a struggle.

  The next poem is a dialogue with the moon.

  I Looked Up from My Writing

  I looked up from my writing,

  And gave a start to see,

  As if rapt in my inditing,

  The moon’s full gaze on me.

  Her meditative misty head

  Was spectral in its air,

  And I involuntarily said,

  ‘What are you doing there?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been scanning pond and hole

  And waterway hereabout

  For the body of one with a sunken soul

  Who has put his life-light out.

  ‘Did you hear his frenzied tattle?

  It was sorrow for his son

  Who is slain in brutish battle,

  Though he has injured none.

  ‘And now I am curious to look

  Into the blinkered mind

  Of one who wants to write a book

  In a world of such a kind.’

  Her temper overwrought me,

  And I edged to shun her view,

  For I felt assured she thought me

  One who should drown him too.

  Now one of Hardy’s greatest poems.

  The Convergence of the Twain

  (Lines on the loss of the Titanic)

  I

  In a solitude of the sea

  Deep from human vanity,

  And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

  II

  Steel chambers, late the pyres

  Of her salamandrine fires,

  Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

  III

  Over the mirrors meant

  To glass the opulent

  The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

  IV

  Jewels in joy designed

  To ravish the sensuous mind

  Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

  V

  Dim moon-eyed fishes near

  Gaze at the gilded gear

  And query: ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?’

  VI

  Well: while was fashioning

  This creature of cleaving wing,

  The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

  VII

  Prepared a sinister mate

  For her – so gaily great –

  A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

  VIII

>   And as the smart ship grew

  In stature, grace, and hue,

  In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

  IX

  Alien they seemed to be:

  No mortal eye could see

  The intimate welding of their later history,

  X

  Or sign that they were bent

  By paths coincident

  On being anon twin halves of one august event,

  XI

  Till the Spinner of the Years

  Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,

  The consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

  Hardy died in 1928. His life had spanned a great length of time. One hot, humid day when he was a child, his grandmother had said to him, ‘It was like this in the French Revolution, I remember.’ When he was born in 1840, the railway had not reached Dorset; when he died, the news went by telephone to London and was immediately broadcast by the BBC.

  Although his ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey, his relatives who thought they knew him better, knew he was at heart a peasant like they were, claimed his heart for their own, and that was buried in Dorset. ‘Ache deep,’ Hardy had written,

  … but make no moans:

  Smile not; but stilly suffer:

  The paths of love are rougher

  Than thoroughfares of stones.

  And when he lay on his deathbed, his sister noted on his face ‘the same triumphant look that all the others bore … but without the smile’.

  Two poems to end with. First, a poem of the Boer War:

  Drummer Hodge

  I

  They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest

  Uncoffined – just as found:

  His landmark is a kopje-crest

  That breaks the veldt around;

  And foreign constellations west

  Each night above his mound.

  II

  Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –

  Fresh from his Wessex home –

  The meaning of the broad Karoo,

  The Bush, the dusty loam,

  And why uprose to nightly view